50 Years of Argentina on Film - with Abla Kandalaft

The Garden Cinema in London is presenting a selection of films from the last five decades that explore how Argentine society has grappled with the aftermath of the military coup of 1976. Speaking about the programme is Abla Kandalaft, film curator and programmer. 

For more information about the programme and the films featured, copy and paste the link below:

https://www.thegardencinema.co.uk/season/50-years-of-argentina-on-film/

Transcript

Jon Bonfiglio 0:02

Hi everyone, welcome back to Latin America Correspondent, where today I'm delighted to say that we have a uh a cross um Atlantic, a cross pond, cross charcoal conversation with uh with London, uh with Abla Candela, who is a film programmer and curator at the Garden Cinema in in London. And I think uh first of all, welcome Abla, but I think we can hear some cinema noises in the background too.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Um you can. That is the background music. Um is that uh is it too loud or can you hear me okay?

Jon Bonfiglio 0:34

No, it's great, it's all authentic background music. It gives it atmosphere. So it's great. Um and just for some context as regards um our conversation today, of course, you are, as I mentioned at the beginning, you're sort of a film program and curator at the Garden Cinema, and the cinema is currently presenting a selection of films from the last half century that look at specifically Argentine society in the context of the military coup of 1976, which, far from being a long-forgotten event, continue to sort of play out and be uh, I mean, in part a sort of a cultural touchstone for Argentina, but also we can see in events of today in the country that it really hasn't gone away and is very present. For those of you who are unaware of it, I'm sure most of you are, but it was, of course, when the country's armed forces overthrew the democratically elected government and installed a dictatorship. Um, it also wasn't an event in isolation, it was happening elsewhere at the time across uh Latin America, and among the consequences of the ongoing uh junta was the disappearance of 30,000 uh people, thousands executed and many more exiled and imprisoned. And to mark the 50th anniversary of the coup, the Garden Cinema uh is now screening a selection of uh sort of classic Argentine um films and documentaries which sort of reflect how Argentine cinema has engaged with grappled with the sort of shifting uh landscape over the years. Um Abla, maybe we can just start with a sort of motivation for the for the season. Um where where does that where does that sort of emerge from? How does that sort of relate to the garden cinema? Where does the the programming impetus come from?

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Absolutely. So uh I'll try and explain what my own curatorial uh practice is. Um my focus is very much on platforming films from around the world that tell particular stories that we just don't hear enough about in um the wider film industry. So uh for the last four years, since I've been working at the Garden Cinema, every spring I curate a season focused on a part of the world that I feel is underrepresented in uh world cinema, specifically to tell stories from the ground. So uh to give you an example, um, a couple of years ago I curated a season of Central American Cinema, which is quite a small film industry. Um so it but there is a cohesive um um uh aspect to a number of films that all emerged roughly at the same time in that part of the world. So we brought them to the fore, we're able to platform them and we're able to couch them in discussions uh and uh and QA's and so on to um tell stories from Central America through its filmmakers and storytellers. And uh last year I focused on Lebanon and on new Lebanese cinema post the 2000s and on the context around that. And this year um a few things happened at the same time to uh guide me towards Argentina. Uh, one was an academic uh and writer called Adam Feinstein, who had expressed interest in a focus on Argentina. He's a regular cinema member and he'd written to me about this. Um, a partner, a regular partner, Cinema Mentire, who are a film organization that focuses on Latin American cinema, also wrote in saying we currently have the rights to a number of um films by Louisa, Marie Louisa Bemberg that we'd like to show, who is Argentinian. And um I wanted to curate uh another season. So I thought, okay, that's that's interesting. And then talking to friends and talking, thinking it through, thinking it about a particular angle, um, uh another filmmaker said, Well, you do realize it's 2026, which is uh marks 50 years since the military coup. And I thought, okay, well, that's a very interesting angle then to adopt because it's not just a rack tag bunch of you know random films from each country that we show, it has to make sense. So um myself and and Adam, uh, with input from uh from a couple of colleagues as well, sat down and went through key films from the last 50 years that would tell in in some way reflect the changes that society had gone through since the coup. And we really didn't want to make it a sort of bleak season um with kind of quite depressing documentaries. Um it had to it had to be rich because that's the beauty of cinema as a medium. It's um it's so good at creating empathy through sheer engagement and entertainment. So we found as I mean we found we we based our selection on some very well-known um celebrated films which uh were Oscar nominated or had won Oscars, you know, like uh Historia Oficial, uh Nueve Arenas uh is very well known. They're very solid thrillers, uh Secret in their rise as well. Um and then we had a couple of um more uh offbeat films. There was La Pelicula del Rey, which is a very interesting film because it's made in the 80s, but it's it's satire, it's very funny. Um, and then Wild Tales, which is also largely a comedy, and then we have very in different on a very different tone. We have a couple of docs with entidad, which looks at um the plight of the disappeared, um, and um um a documentary about Mercedes Sosa, the Latin uh the Argentinian singer. Um so it's a really diverse selection, and uh I was able to end largely thanks to Adam uh to find contacts for the various filmmakers and arrange to have QA's with them. Uh very sadly, the director of La Historia Opicial, Luis Prendo, died shortly um uh after we curated the season. We were thinking of having a QA with him. He passed away a few weeks ago. Um, but we are we do have a QA with a number of the filmmakers, otherwise, we have introductions uh by various uh academics who can offer some context to the films.

Jon Bonfiglio 6:49

Um and just also uh of course we'll link to the Garden Cinema and the program in the show notes for anybody who is in London or nearabouts who wants to head that way. It's a pretty expansive season. It started last uh Friday, 8th of May, and runs right the way through until Friday, the 19th of June. So there's yeah, there's a wide array of of programming um there. And uh in the garden cinemas, for those of you who aren't in London or nearby, uh on that page is a list of the films as well. So potentially folk who are interested can then find those elsewhere also. Um, I'm interested, Abla, just in you you sort of reference it a little bit, but the sort of the um it would be very easy to get lost in because it you know a dictatorship is a heavy thing. It's difficult to sort of sidestep and it tends to sort of swamp over um, I mean, all aspects of of life of a life and history and so on. Um, but as you say, a lot of these films sort of uh reflect a sort of diverse series of responses. Could you just maybe talk a little bit to or maybe with some examples to the to the range and uh and themes of of both what's there and also your sort of uh curatorial process in selecting in selecting some of these uh potentially sort of uh what might be seen as off-beat films?

SPEAKER_01 8:06

Sure. Well, there's there's there are a few things to do with uh the way societies processed the the coup and the aftermath of the coup. And it's been very uneven. As there were solid attempts at trying to hold the uh military accountable for the crimes that they had committed during that time, the junta had committed during the the time of the dictatorship. And these efforts were then uh massively curtailed by successive governments who tried who were pressured by the military then to um so, for example, there was there were trials that were there were um held, and then there were subsequent efforts by the next government to prevent further trials going ahead. So a large contingents of people in Argentina have been fighting over the decades to get accountability, to get to the truth of what happened to all the people that were disappeared. And there have been some measures of success, but there's also been um an omerta around uh the the time of the coup, and that so that that's been reflected in it in the in the c in the culture, and there's another thing as well, uh, which is slightly more insidious, which is things like during the dictatorship, there was um dismantling of certain rights and certain uh civil organizations, and that the country's not quite recovered from that because what that allowed was for an increasing uh increasingly liberal economy, which pauperised a large part of the population. Um it was then hard for unions to be able to work together, it was hard to get civil society to work together to combat this. So there were loads of things that were just trickle down to the entire society and and down the decades, and that's reflected in the films, but it's not necessarily on the nose. So cinema has a really interesting way of dealing with that aftermath. Um now you have, you know, either through so, for example, to when it comes to the disappeared, there was a spate of films um that were used Jarra to try and deal with those subjects in a way that again wasn't too on the nose. Like Historia Official is actually one of them. I mean, it's a film about uh a couple who suspect that their adopted daughter is actually was was kidnapped as a baby from a couple that was disappeared, which this happened quite a lot. And they use thriller, they use uh genre codes to tell that story. Uh, La Pelicula de Rey is also a very interesting one because it's a film within a film, it's it has very funny moments, but it also in that way allows the director to paint to reflect the chaos um of that decade through um the prism of this director who who's handling and managing chaos on set. It kind of reflects the chaos that society was going through at the moment at the time. Um, it also deals with um aspects of Argentinian society that are sort of peripheral um in a way to to the issues at stake with the coup but that that really kind of um are deeply problematic, like how Argentina deals, you know, it's it's largely there's a huge uh number of uh people of European descent, right? And so it's how Argentina deals with its indigenous population. Um and the película del Rey touches on that, but using comedy, and it's very effective. Um, and then completely in a completely different tone, Zama also reflects that, but it it deals with basically it deals with heavy subjects, subjects that are uncomfortable, that make society question itself um through um through the prism of genre. So Zama is a period piece, it's uh it's about the kind of colonial Argentina back in the the 17th century. So it's um it's a very interesting way of dealing with um the kind of the contemporary issues that surround uh the the release of the film. And that's something you see kind of across across the films we're showing. Now, again, there are two documentaries that are kind of is the more straightforward. So Idanti Dad, for example, is really about the plight of uh you know what happens to the baby that was kidnapped at birth. Um it's a man who, as an adult, comes to realise and understand that he was uh uh kidnapped from his biological parents by the junta and given to another couple, and it's uh it goes through how the the impact on that person's identity and how as an adult he has to deal with with the consequences of that. Um and and it's so interesting to compare how a documentary treats the subject and how uh historia oficial treats it as a thriller. Um so so yes, it's it's even I mean, I'm just gonna the last what film I mentioned is Wild Tales. Wild Tales is a more recent film, it's largely comedy, it's completely wacky, it's uh very kind of broad entertainment, but even then it's uh it's uh six short films and they all tell the same story, which is utter frustration with bureaucratic chaos. And that in a large part is also a consequence of uh economic downturn caused by um the the kind of neoliberal economy that was ushered in post-dictatorship.

Jon Bonfiglio 13:45

Yeah, it's really interesting um what you're sort of referencing because of course dictatorships are not just any other government, they're they're involved in the process of nation building, they they don't believe in what's come before, so they um they sort of try and scratch everything out and start again with a kind of a rebirth in their own image. And that necessarily doesn't just bring about a kind of a social chaos, but it there it also means that there are, of course, uh meant deliberate ongoing social consequences uh in ensuing um generations, in which some of the children who were who were taken, who were stolen, and then moved on is is one aspect, but it's as you say as you say, it's also much more insidious than that. And within that as well, of course, writers, filmmakers, and cultural producers are also dangerous. There's a uh cultural creation is almost uh seen as sort of the uh the opposition. And I would guess that that's also I mean, it's 50 years and there's a sort of um a calendar reason to to have this season, but there's also I feel it sort of reflects an urgency in the present moment in uh with what's taking place in Argentina, in part with the downplaying of atrocities that the Malay administration is is doing, uh atrocities that took place during that period of time, but also just how the sort of the the use of um um the perspective of the possibilities of government is the closest that Argentina has been to that 50 50 years ago, now taking place in uh in Buenos Aires, in the Casa Rosada, and in the country more widely.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Um it's always a delicate one when you when we uh curate seasons, um, because the impetus really is to try and reach out to uh to cultural institutions, cultural public institutions from the countries that we represent, because there's a large part of what I do, which is cultural diplomacy. And um, and we have to kind of take it sort of you know deal with the the you know, work with the cards with Delta with, so to speak. Um so with the Central American season, uh the the various we reached out to various um cultural institutes and consulates who were incredibly helpful from from that part of the world. Now, there is a sort of arm's length um way in which cultural institutes operate in in respective countries where they have a bit of leeway to help some efforts uh at promoting their country's culture that might be critical of their current government. Um now for this for this particular season, to be honest, it was we we hadn't reached out to uh any sort of uh public institution mainly because we didn't really have to. Um we didn't need with the Central American season, we uh some of the films were really hard to get, so it helped us out and we it gave us perks. We could offer you know rum. One of the institutes offered us some rum from Panama, for example, and so on. So we we had the ability to give our audience some perks, which kind of drew the crowds in. Uh with this one, it was a pretty easy to pull together season. And I I worked a lot with um academics and with colleagues and so on. So um that's just to give you an idea of kind of would we or we would we have not worked with the with you know with the the representative of the Malay government. But it's true, it's it's a difficult one because you're right. Um there Argentina's in a in a I mean arguably a really difficult position at the moment, and uh a lot of I mean some of the gains from the last few years in terms of accountability uh have just been kind of peddled back. Um, and there is uh you know the the dismantling of uh civil organizations and unions. Um some efforts were made to redress that over the decades, and now again we're going back to that. So um then uh you know we're reading quite dramatic articles about people being you know being forced to eat donkey meat because meat is becoming so expensive. Um so we we again this is kind of a season reflecting on the last 50 years. So it's not directly um uh explicitly about you know Argentina, you know, uh where what the Malay government is doing in Argentina today, but ultimately it is right by default, it kind of we are where we are because of the last 50 years.

Jon Bonfiglio 18:17

Yeah, there's it reminds you of that line, right? The William Faulkner line, the past is not dead, it's not even it's not even past. Abla, can I just say a big thank you for joining us today? Um, really appreciate uh your time. Hope the season goes well. Just as a reminder to to listeners, that's uh that's a season which uh 50 years of Argentina on film, which started on Friday, 8th of May, runs through to Friday, 19th of June uh 2026, and we'll link to all the information in the show notes. And that was Abla Candelaf talking about the ongoing programme at the Garden Cinema in London. Thank you so much, Abla.

SPEAKER_01 18:48

Thank you very much.