Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains

We follow the efforts of Ester Gatti to find her missing granddaughter Mariana Zaffaroni. As a child, Mariana and her parents were kidnapped by a Uruguayan military team. The little girl was taken by an agent in the intelligence service who brought her up as his own daughter. Sixteen years later Ester found Mariana, but the girl chose to go on living with the people who had kidnapped her. This documentary raises questions about identity, memory and the value of truth.

In 1971, Uruguayan journalist and writer Eduardo Galeano published his landmark work Open Veins of Latin America, in which he comprehensively described the centuries of economic exploitation of Latin America. Almost 40 years later, filmmaker Gonzalo Arijon reevaluates the situation. His search takes him from the soybean plantations of the Brazilian Amazon to the tin mines of Bolivia to the deep jungles of Ecuador. Arijon’s politically committed film allows the local populations to speak for themselves, interspersing this with archival footage of speeches by Hugo Chávez, Lula da Silva and Evo Morales. Galeano himself also speaks—sometimes in poetic language— about how the rise of socialist governments in the early 21st century is benefitting Latin America, and what more can be done.