![]() To this day, Heredia says that a large part of the military elites from those years still maintain that they emerged victorious from war. And therefore, it was not necessary to economize on resources, even when they were extreme, to eradicate it.” “That internal enemy had to be annihilated. “There was absolute consensus among the military elites in Argentina to take on a dirty war,” she said. But, Heredia says, it militarized politics instead to attack social movements and this reached levels of violence that had never been seen in the region before. Mariana Heredia, an Argentinean sociologist who is an expert on the dictatorship, says that the military government kept itself in power by promoting the idea that violence is justified as a political strategy.įrom this perspective, the military coup was supported by the false idea that it could re-establish order and also respect the law. Violence "as a legitimate political strategy" And they should be for everyone,” she said. “Regrettably, there are flags that are claimed by the left or the right. She says her paternal grandfather, a banker, narrowly escaped a bomb that was planted beneath his desk, possibly by a left-wing militant group. Padilla's family also endured threats from different political sides. ![]() Her return kept getting delayed and delayed until no one talked about her anymore.” ![]() “We told my younger brothers, who were 3 and 4 at the time, that mom had an accident in the United States and she was hospitalized. “When someone asked about my mom, I would say that she was on a trip to New York,” she said. A scene from Swiss filmmaker Andreas Fontana’s "Azor." Courtesy MUBI It’s a fitting coda for a chilling expedition into the capitalist jungle.Padilla says that her father tried to find her mother, but he started getting threatening phone calls. One terrifying Monsignor (Pablo Torre Nilson), a man of immense power, precisely echoes Colonel Kurtz’s final belief that the Company should simply “exterminate all the brutes!”. Its absence, like Keys or Harry Lime in The Third Man, is pronounced. This is a world of swimming pools and racehorses and fragrant wives, including Stéphanie Cléau’s compelling Ines, whose initially enterprising sleuthing finally gives way to ruthless ambition that would make Lady Macbeth blush: “Your father was right,” she chastises her husband, “fear makes you mediocre.”Īs with the concealing language of the dictatorship, death is everywhere, just not on screen. Gabriel Sandru’s camera hovers – nervously, curiously – around the edges of luxurious social gatherings. The creeping dread that underscores Azor never escalates into anything as untidy as bloodshed. This political thriller takes place in 1980 as the “National Reorganisation Process” is sending thousands of socialists, dissidents and reformers to their deaths. That double-speak mirrors the evil euphemisms of the Argentinian junta that assumed power in 1976. The junta's dirty war is glimpsed in the opening scenes, as two young men are interrogated at gunpoint on the streets of Buenos Aires The uneasy sensation that some knotted conspiracy is at play is amplified by the film’s many obfuscations and codes: the very title is a watchword among Swiss financiers to “be quiet. Watching Andreas Fontana’s wildly impressive first feature, co-written by the director and writer Mariano Llinás, is a little like being Warren Beatty in The Parallax View. Over the course of various meetings, Yvan seeks to reassure his super-rich clients that their money is safe, while he uncovers contradictory accounts (“depraved”, “very charming”) of his missing partner, Keys, and finally, the name of a shadowy client, who may know something of Keys’s whereabouts. ![]() A mystery fashioned in the shape of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Azor follows Yvan de Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione, in a surgically enigmatic performance), a private Swiss banker and chic wife Ines (Stéphanie Cléau) from Geneva to Argentina, where Yvan’s partner has disappeared.
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