17 Monuments

From toponymy, a branch of linguistics, to politics, the links can be quite unexpected. These are which are sought to be revealed in the new fi lm by Jonathan Perel who uses his filmwork as a tool to explore and accurately document the marks left by previous dictators of Argentina. We are in the province of Tucuman, in the north of Argentina, an emblematic region where the fi rst Act of Independence in South America was signed in 1816 and where the “Operation Independence” took place in 1974, during which the guerillas’ insurgence was violently repressed.

A film director confides in his interlocutor. He talks about the working process, about creative blocks, about artistic crises and expressive forces. At some point, the idea takes hold that this conversation could be turned into a film. And this is the very film we’re watching the two of them in.

Images of Argentinian companies and factories in the first light of day, seen from the inside of a car, while the director reads out documents in voiceover that reveals the collusion of the same concerns in the military dictatorship’s terror.

John J. is a seasoned hit man sent on a job to Argentina. When the General he's sent to kill delays his return to the country, John passes the time with Manuela, a beautiful dancer who becomes his teacher and guide into Argentina's sensual world of the tango.

Fabián, a magician from Buenos Aires, saves his money from weddings, birthdays, and bar mitzvahs, and uses a hidden camera to document a week-long trip to the Falkland Islands where he has a patriotic plan: to impregnate a British woman. If 500 Argies do this annually, the islands will soon be overrun with children belonging to both cultures.

In Camouflage, writer Félix Bruzzone embodies a runner who has an obsession with Campo de Mayo, the biggest military unit in Argentina. It is also the place where his mother disappeared in 1976 and the main clandestine center of detention, torture and extermination during the last dictatorship. The film will follow Félix as he finds characters that allow him to enter and explore this place so loaded with history.

Architectural plans, graphics of abstract forms that gradually become recognizable images, photographs of facades, descriptive texts. Perel returns to the site where the Clandestine Detention, Torture, and Extermination Center (ESMA) once operated, but this time his approach is different. Not only because he enters from a different physical location than the one that represents his entry into the social imaginary, but also because his approach aims to contemplate, no longer the construction of a new place, but the destruction of space. This annihilation, Perel seems to be telling us, brings down much more than columns, cement, and metal beams.

In and around the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), the Navy Mechanics School, a former clandestine centre for detention, torture and extermination in Buenos Aires from 1976 to 1983.

An archaeologist and a weapons designer, who knew each other in a previous life as a filmmaker and a psychoanalyst, meet at an excavation site in the Negev desert and begin a conversation about love and war, which they continue in the Israeli city of Be’er Sheva. A series of encounters with alternating actors in different roles ensues, which leads the viewer through the cities of Athens, Berlin, Hong Kong and São Paulo. Among those appearing are: an old artist who meets his younger self; a mother who lives with her two grown-up sons, a priest and a policeman; a Chinese and a Japanese woman; a curator and a cosmologist.

Graffiti in the former clandestine centres for detention, torture and extermination, El Olimpo and Automotores Orletti, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.