This book explores the representation of the 1976–1983 military dictatorship in the Argentine cinema of the decade that followed the return to civilian rule in 1983. At a time when national identity was in need of reshaping, and a new and more egalitarian array of social habits needed to be promoted, film became a privileged arena in which to give image and voice to a new national project. The films produced between 1983 and 1993 bear witness to the historical milieu from which they emerged and the complex relationships between this period and the one immediately preceding it. The study of how the traumatic legacy of the dictatorship is presented in a selected corpus of these films will therefore offer new insights into the defining characteristics and development of the so-called cinema of redemocratization. It will further allow us to ponder the contributions of this cinema to the formation of both a new identity and a historical imagery for a nation that has experienced major social, cultural and political change in the last 30 years.

On 10 December 1983, Raúl Alfonsín became the first democratically elected president of the Argentine Republic after seven years of military rule. Between 1930 and 1976, the Argentine nation witnessed seven coups d’état, each followed by an increasingly violent exercise of power by the armed forces, the crudest of all being the 1976–1983 dictatorship. Its legacy was a lost war – the Malvinas / Falklands war (April–June 1982), which, ironically, accelerated the downfall of the regime. The country was left in economic disarray, with thousands of desaparecidos, also referred to in English as ‘the disappeared’. The desaparecidos – the unavoidable central issue around which the new Argentine democracy was to be built (Vezzetti, 1998) – number 9,000 according to official reports, although human rights organisations have always claimed a correct estimate to be around 30,000.

What happened in Argentina during the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganisation), as the military referred to both their political project and their government, became known internationally as the Dirty War – an expression that today alludes to state terrorism and its associated systematic violation of human rights. Whereas the latter term is central to this study, concerned as it is primarily with the representation of the recent past in post-dictatorship Argentine cinema, the former will hardly be used here.