Desembarcos

From 1976 till 1982, Argentina was at war. The military were not fighting a foreign enemy, but a red spectre that they saw turning up from all corners of the country. All methods were applied to win the battle: tens of thousands of civilians were kidnapped, tortured, and killed. Now that the soldiers have left for the barracks, the national trauma of dirty war remains.
How does one deal with such a trauma? Jeanine Meerapfel examined this in . The idea for this film arose when Jeanine Meerapfel led a film workshop in Buenos Aires, organized by the Goethe Institute. From thirty scripts she selected three that dealt with the emotion of 'fear'. She did this because she saw that Argentinian society was still dominated by fear. Fear of a possible return of the military and fear of the idea that the past would be hushed up and forgotten.

shows the problems of the country without giving solutions, because the people have not yet come to grips with the past. Even the film makers in the workshop sometimes wondered what the use was of bringing back the past. Is it not better to forget?
But the documentary also shows people who refuse to forget, like the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who resist the amnesty laws for the soldiers. These laws make it impossible for the Argentinian civilian to confront the military for their crimes against humanity, and thus he is robbed of an opportunity to come to terms with the past.