Marco Bechis • Director of Back to Buenos Aires
“We live in an era in which survivors are everywhere”
- VENICE 2026: The Italian director explains the highly topical reasons that led him to return to the subject of the military dictatorship in Argentina
A man scarred by the dictatorship (Adriano Giannini) is called back to Argentina to testify at the trial against the military responsible for his abduction and torture. With Back to Buenos Aires, presented in competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, Marco Bechis embarks on a new journey into memory to assert that survivors must become witnesses and lend meaning to justice.
Cineuropa: In 1977, you were abducted by the police in the Argentinian capital and taken to a clandestine prison. But the film’s protagonist isn’t you. How did you land on that character?
Marco Bechis: I met someone who passed away two years ago, Mario Villani, one of the three people to whom the film is dedicated, who spent more than four years kidnapped in various concentration camps. He wrote a very beautiful book together with a literature professor in the USA, Fernando Reati, in which he recounts every stage of his imprisonment in minute detail. Villani was a physicist, so he was a genius at solving practical problems, and he started by fixing the water pump for the bathrooms in the basement where he was held. They kept him alive because they needed him. He racked his brains to make himself constantly useful, amidst the anxiety that at any moment someone might send him to his death. Eventually, they began letting him out, a weekend at home: he was like a ghost; none of his friends would show up, out of fear. When democracy arrived, for six months, they kept calling him on the phone, threatening him, until he found the courage to turn to a human-rights organisation. He became one of the most important witnesses because he had a list of the torturers’ names.
In the film, however, it’s a young doctor who collaborates by administering pentothal to prisoners being put on the planes from which they would be thrown into the ocean. The movie clearly shows this process of subjugation that led people to name their own comrades.
Villani spoke very candidly about how he had to give the names of some of his comrades, who then disappeared while he remained alive. There’s no pentothal, but the concept is the same. They were taken around by car and had to point out those who were to be arrested, under the threat of being returned to the torture table. The electric picana inflicted searing, unbearable pain.
After Olympic Garage and Children, why did you feel the need to make this film?
I talk about things I know, and choosing this subject stemmed from the feeling that we live in an era in which survivors are everywhere - Gaza, Africa, where we don’t even know what’s going on - and at the same time, very few of these survivors end up being witnesses in trials against those who perpetrated these crimes. We talk about Netanyahu, but we also talk about 7 October, about what’s happening in Ukraine. At this point, one wonders whether we are heading towards an era in which we will all be survivors but there will be no witnesses, in a process that does not heal the deepest wounds but at least gives some meaning to justice. The journey from being a survivor to becoming a witness is what I depict in the film. It took the protagonist 30 years to become a witness, and we portray the moment when he makes that decision.
You also depict a generation that thought it would start a revolution and was thwarted. What remains now?
We were over-ambitious, ideological and naive, but we clearly believed in it wholeheartedly. What has remained is the desire to bring about change, each of us in our own field. I make militant cinema, in the sense that I do not necessarily deal with political subjects, but I make sure that the way I make a movie is political for me. It is about how you do things. Every time I conceive a film, I see it as a prototype, so that a film on a given subject has to be made up of elements that are unique to it: a certain type of casting, a certain way of working with the actors, a carefully chosen crew. All of my crews have been different. We were defeated, certainly, but I feel more defeated today than I did then.
(Translated from Italian)
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