Félix Bruzzone

A corpse appears in the underground tunnels of a house, or perhaps they're the dark corridors of the subway. The dead man doesn't speak, yet stories are woven around him. Just like in a novel, the characters create their own fiction, a story to tell to children, to society, or a way to imagine the missing passages of recent Argentine history. Félix the pool attendant and Kike the subway employee, both writers, take us, not without humor, to a narrative beyond the daily life: What remains to be resolved? How do you clean a pool full of frogs? Who is the dead man in the trunk? Is he one of the many people who disappeared during the dictatorship?

Fatherland brings a rigorous structural approach to a site of monuments that is also a place of movement, criss-crossed daily by tourists and locals. The grounds are laid out like city blocks, with wide avenues branching onto laneways filled with elaborate mausoleums. The film does not attempt to tour the cemetery as one would on foot, however, but rather moves chronologically through the history enshrined there. A series of individuals are framed in static compositions as they read aloud excerpts from the writings of noteworthy Argentines interred within. (Some license has been taken, as the final resting places of certain figures represented - such as journalist Rodolfo Walsh, who was among the "disappeared" - remain unknown. The result is both poetic and political.) Beginning in the early 1800s, this history comprises civil war, battles with the country's native population, the conflict between the city and the provinces, and years of military dictatorship.