Against family loyalty: documentary films on descendants of perpetrators from the last Argentinean dictatorship

Abstract

ABSTRACT In recent years, both academia and popular culture have shown what some scholars have pointed out as the turn to the perpetrator. Although the voice of the perpetrator has never been completely silent since the National Reorganization Process (the military junta’s name for state terror and economic reorganization ended in 1983), recently two documentary films, 70 y Pico (‘70 and Pico’, Mariano Corbacho 2016) and El hijo del cazador (‘The son of the hunter’, Federico Robles and Germán Scelso 2018), have addressed the Argentinean dictatorship from the perpetrator´s perspective. These films have two things in common. One is that they highlight the pact of silence among the Argentinean perpetrators; the second one, is that the main characters are perpetrator descendants. With this in mind, this article analyse the representations of the perpetrators in these two films. First, I will provide background information about earlier Argentinean cultural products dealing with perpetrators, including documentary cinema, before examining the context in which the voices of the children emerge. Finally, the analysis will focus on the way in which these films break family loyalty.