Marco Bechis returns to dictatorship trauma with Venice contender

More than 25 years after Garage Olimpo, filmmaker Marco Bechis examines the lasting scars Argentina’s dictatorship inflicted on survivors in Ritorno a Buenos Aires, which is competing at the Venice Film Festival.

The film tells the story of Mariano Guerra, an Italian doctor who decides to return to Buenos Aires to testify at the trial of the military officers who held him captive and enslaved him, after more than three decades away from Argentina.

Bechis, an Italian-Chilean who lived in Argentina in his youth, drew on his own experience. In 2020, he travelled there to testify about the time he spent detained in 1977 in an underground concentration camp.

“That was the trigger: I wanted to make a film about that surreal encounter between a survivor and his captors in a courtroom,” the 70-year-old filmmaker told the AFP news agency.

‘Enemy’

The character of Mariano Guerra, who has serious doubts about returning to Argentina and reliving that period, spent more than two years in captivity – an especially long period.

For Bechis, the figure of the survivor is particularly interesting, sometimes as a collaborator, because “he worked inside the camps in order to survive and had to give his time and, in some way, also betray his fellow prisoners”.

As a result, survivors are sometimes repudiated by others.

“Because he had this role as a slave, who had to follow orders, they saw him as part of the enemy,” Bechis said.

According to the director, some people do not regard survivors as genuine victims in the same way as those who died or were disappeared.

“Others see the survivor as someone who was lucky because he is alive ... and who has no right to be traumatised,” he said.

As with Garage Olimpo, the award-winning 1999 feature that brought Bechis international recognition for its portrayal of the horrors of Argentina’s clandestine detention centres, Mariano Guerra’s story is not based on a single real person but constructed from several accounts.

“Everything seen in this film has a documentary basis, but it has been creatively combined,” Bechis said, insisting that Mariano is not him, although the Italian doctor has much in common with the filmmaker himself.

‘Voluntary exile’

To play the tormented protagonist, Bechis chose Italian actor Adriano Giannini, with whom he found “a great emotional connection.”

“That character contains a lot of me, but I didn't have to explain it to him. He soaked it up, absorbed it and made it his own,” Bechis recalled.

Presented as a Brazilian-Italian co-production, the film was shot in Porto Alegre and Turin, despite most of the story being set in Buenos Aires.

“I made a film in voluntary exile,” the filmmaker said.

He admits the production could have been filmed in Argentina, but in his view it is not possible to make films in a country governed by “an authoritarian technocrat,” whose name he refuses even to mention because “the less we name him, the faster he will go.”

Instead, Bechis recreated locations from certain Buenos Aires, particularly the run-down and outdated centre where witnesses are housed. Only a handful of aerial shots of streets were actually filmed in the capital.

Ritorno a Buenos Aires is not the only film about a Latin American dictatorship competing for the Golden Lion. Also in contention is Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, about two CIA agents who travel to Chile’s Easter Island in the months before Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup.

Asked whether it remains important to address authoritarian periods today, Bechis said it was still necessary.

Above all, he said, because people no longer protest as they did at the time, when mass demonstrations were organised across Europe against what was happening in Latin America.