Many ended up as desaparecidos, people taken by the government and not returned. The film is about one mother's search for the truth about her adopted daughter and her discovery brings harsh political reality very close to home.
She teaches History to high school students and enjoys a family that includes her well-to-do husband Roberto Hector Alterio and 5-year old adopted daughter Gaby Analia Castro. Not used to asking questions, she believes whatever she has read in history books and is confused when one of her students tells her that "history is written by assassins. When her friend Ana Chunchuna Villafane visits after living in exile for many years, however, she learns, in an intensely emotional scene, that Ana had been imprisoned and tortured by the police trying to locate her husband, a suspected "subversive".
Ana tells Alicia that many others had "disappeared" and that babies had been taken from their mothers and given to childless friends of the junta. Alicia begins to wonder if her own child was the daughter of a political victim and questions her husband but when he is evasive, she suspects that he may be hiding a dark secret. Although fearful at the prospect of losing Gaby, Alicia is determined to find out about her daughter's past and begins to search hospital records and government archives.
Ultimately, she must confront her own responsibility in a climax of shattering force that underscores the tragedy of political ideologues who would rather destroy family solidarity than risk losing power. Details Edit. Release date November 8, United States.
Spanish English. Die offizielle Geschichte. Historias Cinematograficas Cinemania Progress Communications. Box office Edit. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 1 hour 52 minutes.
Related news. Oct 25 ScreenDaily. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Top Gap. By what name was La historia oficial officially released in Canada in English? See more gaps Learn more about contributing. Edit page. Hollywood Icons, Then and Now. See the gallery. Like so many other disciplines, mine—which once was referred to as Spanish but now takes on so many permutations sometimes I find it difficult to think of it as anything more than an afterimage—is no longer as defined as it once was.
We may still teach Spanish as well as several other languages, depending on the department , but our upper-division courses look little like those of the past, even those of my own increasingly less recent undergraduate experience in the lates and earlys. Teaching cinema, unsurprisingly, poses its own unique challenges and rewards within such a fragmented discipline whose undergraduate majors and minors are typically interested first in language acquisition, second in culture, broadly defined, and third, I hope, in a subfield like Latin American cinema.
Luis Puenzo, has been the most problematic for me. Along others like Tiempo de revancha Time for Revenge. Eliseo Subiela, , La historia oficial formed part of the first wave of Argentine films to confront the state terrorism strongly supported by the United States of the mids and earlys.
Peter Bogdanovich, —and its influence—numerous films of the New Argentine Cinema, for example, represent different aspects of the Guerra Sucia and its sociohistorical legacy— La historia oficial is a film you feel obliged to teach.
Only sons of bitches, thieves, accomplices, and the oldest of my boys went up! Focusing on Alicia, La historia oficial follows her through her eventual discovery that the stories that had dominated her personal and professional lives were, in fact, nothing more than convenient fictions.
Through centering the film on Alicia, Puenzo was harshly criticized for transforming the torturer into the tortured. It is rather the criminal who has the problem here.
He and his criminal wife, a history teacher whose complete ignorance and innocence they are trying to convince me about. Especially at the microlevel, the politics of La historia oficial has proven difficult to work through in class. Detached not only from the lived experience of the dictatorship, but also from deep historical contextualization, my students have had apolitical reactions to a decidedly political situation. Can a film be committed to human rights if, as Agresti suggests, the real victims of state terrorism are not represented?
Can the complicit, or even the criminal, also be the victim? This opens the film to critique. These films— Garage Olimpo dir. Diego Lerman, immediately come to mind—depict the violence s of the Guerra Sucia in a supposedly more meaningful way. When Alicia goes to her classes she encounters street demonstrations demanding the return of the "disappeared.
She questions her husband, who had arranged for the adoption, but he brushes her off, saying that it is of no concern to her. Not satisfied with this response, she searches hospital records and government archives. At one of these occasions three women who are searching for "disappeared" relatives overhear and approach her.
She becomes increasingly convinced that her daughter must have been taken from a murdered political prisoner. She is grief-stricken at the thought that she might have to give her daughter up but at the same time she empathizes with the unknown relatives who have lost the child; she is in despair.
When Sara Chela Ruiz , one of the three women, presents to her convincing evidence that Gaby is actually her own granddaughter, Alicia confronts her husband in Sara's presence. Alicia has come to believe that Roberto--an admitted rightist--was duplicitous but he ridicules them both and, after Sara leaves, becomes enraged with his wife, brutally attacking and physically injuring her.
She leaves him.
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