(H) Historias cotidianas

Argentine filmmaker Andrés Habegger embarks on a deeply personal journey in this documentary, seeking to recover memories and information about his father, Norberto Habegger, a journalist and Montonero activist who disappeared in Brazil in 1978 during a joint operation between the Argentine and Brazilian military. Traveling to places that were part of his life and revisiting old photos and his childhood diaries, the director fills in the gaps in a family history that was interrupted.

They have music, but they live on the fringes. They see music as an ideal, as a future. In front of them lies reality. Boys and girls between the ages of 7 and 13 from a children's classical music orchestra in the south of Buenos Aires.

The omnibus feature SUCESOS INTERVENIDOS consists of shorts by a who’s who of Argentine documentary and experimental-film giants, including Edgardo Cozarinsky and Gustavo Fontán but also Claudio Caldini, Andrés Di Tella and Gabriela Golder. Each one of them created a piece of a few minutes in length using archival footage from SUCESOS ARGENTINOS (“Argentine Events”), a popular newsreel series from 1938 to 1972 whose episodes have recently begun to be digitized by Buenos Aires’s “Pablo C. Ducrós Hicken” Film Museum.

A documentary on the life and work of Swedish/Argentinean photojournalist Leonardo Henrichsen (1940-1973), a known international news cameraman whose final image shot was his own death on the hands of a soldier, while capturing images from an attempted military coup in Chile on June, 1973.

In 1978, the militant Tulio Valenzuela was kidnapped in Argentina, along with his partner Raquel ─pregnant─ and their little son. At that moment, General Galtieri proposes that they save their lives in exchange for traveling to Mexico and handing over the leadership of the Montoneros. There, Tulio escapes and denounces the Argentine military. He knows that with this fact, Raquel will have a tragic end.

Collective film made in times of confinement. April 2020. The film gives visual form to inner worlds—what the directors see and how they see it. How they inhabit their spaces, their bodies, their fears and perspectives in isolation, and how they connect with the “outside worlds.”

Diana Rutkus was born a nomad, but she learned this only years later. The daughter of a tightrope walker and trapeze artist mother and a lion tamer and drummer father, Diana spent her childhood between the circus tent and the trailer. Cirquera thus explores a search for a diffuse and fragmented history.

Two somewhat anachronistic passions occur in the days of Arturo “Tucho” Lazlo: the music from the vast collection of vinyls that rotate on his record player and the paintings that he makes in a collective workshop. The first passion seems logical considering Tucho's current condition: blindness. Painting, on the other hand, is not a task that can be easy for you; on the contrary, it is a challenge taken frame by frame that allows her to relate to the visual universe that a tragic decision has strictly denied her. This film-portrait follows Tucho's daily experiences in his connection with the world, from his art to his discomfort, with a present that evokes a macabre past in the foreground. Without detours and without blurring the specific weight of everyday moments, Andrés Hebegger manages to register the tension and rest, sadness and hope, the banality and genius of Tucho's world, without ever being condescending or mellow, always looking for distance fair.

The axis of the film is the construction of memory: where, finally, are the memories lodged? From that interrogation, the director and protagonist assembles and disassembles a story where his children and his father appear to confirm that his memory is also the memory of a descendant that does not forget the past. (Marcela Gamberini)

D-Humanos is a choral project coordinated by Pablo Nisenson in which nine filmmakers participate and aim to reflect, in an equal number of short films, the state of human rights in Argentina today.