The former ESMA in Buenos Aires was used as a clandestine detention camp where civilians were tortured and killed. It has been converted into a"museum of memory" and is now home to human rights groups and exhibits about the dictatorship.Standing beneath the birch and flowering jacaranda trees at what used to be ESMA it's not easy to picture the horrors that took place at this sprawling urban campus in Buenos Aires.
Forty years after the fall of that dictatorship, a video record of its trial — the only example of a Latin American democracy convicting its own oppressors — is having its U.S. premiere at Film Forum in New York., is composed entirely of video shot during those courtroom proceedings. Using two stationary, state-of-the-art, U-matic video cameras, Argentina's public television captured some 530 hours of testimony between April and December 1985.
It's disconcerting to realize how close victims at ESMA were to the society from which they'd been snatched. Just across a busy highway are shops and apartment buildings — an unnerving contrast to the sorts of atrocities witnesses detail in the film. Teenagers swept up on what was known as the"Night of the Pencils," for serving on high school student councils — 15-year-olds, brutalized, raped and murdered, remembers a lone survivor.
Because their captivity was never acknowledged by the regime, the victims were known as"the disappeared." And as the editor of the English-language'Instead of stopping the killing, they tried to stop people reporting the killing'
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