Buenos Aires, 19 April 1977. As he leaves the school where he studies, 20-year-old Marco Bechis is abducted by a group of plain-clothes soldiers. A well-to-do boy who spent his teenage years between Italy and Argentina under the military regime, he had drawn close to the opposition movement of the Montoneros. He ends up in a clandestine prison, where he remains for a few days. In 1982, in Milan, he created a video installation, Desaparecidos, dove sono?, from which, years later, once he had become a filmmaker, he drew Olympic Garage, presented in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard. He also dedicated Children to the desaparecidos, which was presented in Venice’s Cinema of the Present section and which recounts the ordeal of the children of disappeared Argentinians illegally adopted by families of former military officers. Today, he is in competition at the Venice Film Festival with Back to Buenos Aires, with which he tries to reckon once and for all with the traumatic experience of being abducted for political reasons in a basement in the Argentinian capital, and with the existence of a survivor, taking us inside the courtroom where he faced his jailers who had been brought to trial.

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The film’s story, however, is not the director’s. The protagonist, Mariano Guerra, played by Adriano Giannini, is not Bechis, but like Bechis, he is one of the few survivors of that tragedy. It’s 2008. Mariano is an Italian A&E doctor who has just performed resuscitation on a patient, saving his life. He goes home and once again ignores the recorded messages on his answering machine from the Buenos Aires prosecutor’s office inviting him to testify in the “Olympic Garage” trial (named after the secret prison). Mariano is terrified at the idea of having to look his torturers in the eye more than 30 years on.

After listening again to some old audio cassettes documenting his captivity, he decides to leave. Together with other survivors who are testifying, he is housed in accommodation provided by the Ministry of Justice, where he reunites with people who shared his fate of imprisonment. The atmosphere among them teeters between caution and open mistrust. Each of them knows that, in the days of General Videla’s military dictatorship, those arrested were subjected to electric-shock torture to force them to name their comrades, and were often compelled to accompany the plain-clothes military officers to point out people to be arrested. As he awaits the day of his testimony, anguishing memories resurface forcefully in Mariano’s mind. Among the spectators at the trial, Mariano recognises the infamous Dr K (Adrián Fondari, who made his acting debut in Olympic Garage and Children), whom no one has ever managed to expose. A flashback reveals that Mariano, as a young medical student, had become Dr K’s assistant in the prison infirmary, and the doctor spared him from death (although not from the daily rapes by the other tormentors). For two years and 46 days, Mariano assisted tortured comrades, but he also administered pentothal to those who were taken onto military cargo planes and thrown, still alive, into the ocean.

There is a taut, cathartic moment in this film when the doctor-torturer, confident in his impunity, corners Mariano in the courthouse bathroom to make sure his “faithful little dog” won’t testify against him. “You’re only here to cleanse your conscience.” Mariano is literally paralysed with terror, snaps to attention and wets his trousers as if reliving those horrific days. The survivor now knows that the fate of one of those responsible for the systematic murders perpetrated by the Argentinian military, hitherto beyond the reach of justice, lies in his hands. That this is the moment to lay down that burden, after years of living with the guilt of having survived. And that this is what he owes to those who weren’t so fortunate.

Back to Buenos Aires is an Italian-Brazilian co-production by Fandango, 39Films, Karta Film, 34 Filmes with Rai Cinema. Fandango is handling its international sales.