Beyond Moral Absolutes: Cinema and Historical Memory in Latin America

The relationship between cinema and historical memory becomes particularly complex when films attempt to represent periods of state terror and political violence. This essay examines two landmark Latin American films—Luis Puenzo's The Official Story (Argentina, 1985) and João Batista de Andrade's I'm Still Here (Brazil, 2012)—through the lens of personal experience and cultural analysis. Having lived through the Argentine military dictatorship and witnessed firsthand the transition from Argentine authoritarianism to Brazilian society in 1978, I offer a perspective that bridges the academic and the deeply personal, exploring how different national approaches to representing dictatorship reflect broader cultural and historical patterns.

The central argument of this article is that the effectiveness of testimonial cinema lies not in its political clarity but in its capacity to honor the complexity of survival and trauma. While The Official Story reduces the experience of state terror to a moral fable with clear heroes and villains, I'm Still Here creates space for the ambiguous, bureaucratic horror that characterized the Brazilian military regime, ultimately providing a more profound engagement with historical memory.

The Argentine Approach: Moral Absolutes and Missing Complexity

The Official Story arrived in 1985, during the immediate aftermath of Argentina's return to civilian rule, when the wounds of the "dirty war" were still fresh and the demand for justice was at its peak. The film follows Alicia, an upper-middle-class teacher who gradually awakens to the horrific reality that her adopted daughter may be the child of "disappeared" political prisoners. Puenzo's narrative constructs a clear moral universe where complicity is discovered, acknowledged, and ultimately rejected.

La Historia Oficial | Official Poster

However, this moral clarity comes at the cost of psychological and political complexity. The military and police characters in the film are essentially cardboard villains—brutal, cold, and entirely unsympathetic. This representation, while satisfying to audiences seeking vindication, fails to grapple with a more disturbing truth: many of the perpetrators of state terror were, in their private lives, genuinely "lovable" people. They returned home to dinner with their families, were kind to their neighbors, and often genuinely believed they were saving their country from chaos.

The French film An Average Little Man (Un homme de trop, 1967) provides a more psychologically credible approach to this moral complexity. By presenting the collaborator as a recognizably human figure—flawed but not monstrous—the film forces audiences to confront the unsettling reality that evil often wears a familiar face. Puenzo's failure to humanize the repressors represents a missed opportunity to explore the mechanisms through which ordinary people become complicit in extraordinary violence.

This limitation is particularly evident when we consider the real-case inspiration for Puenzo's story. The young woman who served as the model for the adopted daughter in the film has, to this day, refused to acknowledge her biological parents and remains anonymous. This tragic reality reveals the profound success of some of these forced adoptions—children who genuinely love their adoptive families, creating moral labyrinths that resist simple narratives of recognition and reunion.

Institutional Memory and Cultural Formation

The differences between Argentine and Brazilian approaches to representing dictatorship may be understood through their distinct historical trajectories and institutional cultures. Brazil's monarchical legacy, lasting nearly seventy years, embedded within the social fabric a deep respect for hierarchy and formal protocols. Even during the military dictatorship (1964-1985), this institutional DNA manifested in a peculiar form of bureaucratic politeness—the maintenance of social courtesies and proper procedures even while committing atrocities.

Argentina, by contrast, has been engaged in a perpetual struggle to establish stable democratic institutions since independence in 1810. This ongoing institutional instability has created a political culture characterized by confrontation rather than accommodation, by revolutionary energy rather than bureaucratic routine. When the Argentine military seized power in 1976, their exercise of authority was more nakedly brutal, less concerned with maintaining the facade of legitimate process.

These cultural differences produced distinct forms of state terror: in Brazil, disappearances were systematized, institutionalized, almost "civilized" in their presentation; in Argentina, violence was more improvisational and direct. To put it starkly: in Brazil, they would disappear you with the proper paperwork; in Argentina, they would simply disappear you.

The Brazilian Alternative: Bureaucratic Horror and Dignified Resistance

I'm Still Here represents a fundamentally different approach to testimonial cinema. Rather than constructing a narrative of moral awakening, the film follows Eunice Paiva through the decades following her husband's disappearance by the Brazilian military regime. The film's power lies not in revelation but in endurance—the slow, bureaucratic nightmare of seeking acknowledgment from institutions designed to deny truth.

I'm Still Here | Official Poster

The film's treatment of the repressive apparatus reflects the bureaucratic culture of Brazilian authoritarianism. The security forces maintain formal politeness; they address Eunice as "madam" and operate within a framework of institutional courtesy that makes their violence more unsettling, not less. This representation captures something essential about the Brazilian experience: the way power operated through established forms and procedures, maintaining a veneer of legitimacy even while systematically violating human rights.

This approach allows the film to explore the ambiguous spaces that binary narratives cannot accommodate. The perpetrators are not caricatures of evil but recognizable institutional actors operating within a system that normalized horror through routine. This bureaucratic politeness, tied to Brazil's monarchical past, created a form of authoritarianism that was perhaps more psychologically devastating than Argentina's more direct brutality.

Personal Testimony: The Emotional Politics of Recognition

My own experience viewing these films reveals the profound difference between cinema that seeks to persuade and cinema that seeks to witness. When I saw The Official Story in Los Angeles in 1985, I left the screening angry, thirsty for vengeance, wanting to set the record straight. The film had reduced my experience and that of thousands like me to a simplified moral lesson that failed to capture the complexity of survival under state terror.

Myself, Between Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, 1978

By contrast, when I watched I'm Still Here at a theater in New York, I found myself unable to leave my seat, overcome by profound emotion. The film had created space for the kind of bureaucratic horror I had witnessed during my transition from Argentina to Brazil in 1978. Other audience members left the theater avoiding eye contact, perhaps recognizing in my tears something they could not quite name—the presence of someone for whom this was not merely a movie but a form of testimony.

This difference reveals something crucial about the politics of cinematic representation. The Official Story, despite its good intentions and undeniable historical importance, treated trauma as material for civic education. I'm Still Here approached trauma as a complex reality that resists simple interpretation, trusting audiences to engage with ambiguity rather than seeking to resolve it.

Cinema as Testimony: Art, Truth, and Historical Memory

The question of how cinema should represent historical trauma extends beyond aesthetic choices to fundamental questions about the relationship between art and truth. Testimonial cinema faces a particular challenge: how to honor the experiences of survivors while creating works that speak to broader audiences who may lack direct knowledge of the historical events being depicted.

The Official Story chose the path of moral clarity, constructing a narrative that would leave no doubt about the ethical positions audiences should adopt. This approach, while politically effective in the context of Argentina's transition to democracy, ultimately reduces the complexity of historical experience to the requirements of political messaging.

I'm Still Here demonstrates an alternative approach: cinema as witness rather than advocate. By refusing to simplify the moral landscape, the film creates space for viewers to engage with historical trauma on its own terms rather than through predetermined political frameworks. This approach requires greater trust in audiences and greater comfort with ambiguity, but it offers the possibility of deeper emotional and intellectual engagement with historical memory.

The distinction between these approaches becomes particularly significant when we consider the long-term cultural impact of testimonial cinema. Films that reduce historical complexity to moral lessons may serve important political functions in moments of transition, but they risk creating oversimplified historical narratives that fail to prepare societies for the complexities of memory, justice, and reconciliation.

Conclusion: The Ethics of Representation

The comparison between The Official Story and I'm Still Here reveals fundamental tensions in the representation of historical trauma. While both films serve important functions in their respective national contexts, they demonstrate radically different approaches to the ethics of representation.

The Official Story, emerging in the immediate aftermath of Argentine dictatorship, served the political need for clarity and vindication. Its moral absolutes provided a framework for understanding recent trauma and assigning responsibility for past violence. However, this clarity came at the cost of psychological complexity and historical nuance.

I'm Still Here, produced in a different political moment and cultural context, demonstrates the possibilities of testimonial cinema that embraces rather than resolves ambiguity. By presenting bureaucratic horror as a form of normalized violence, the film creates space for understanding how authoritarian systems operate through institutional routine rather than exceptional brutality.

For those of us who lived through these periods, cinema's approach to our experiences carries particular weight. We seek not vindication but recognition, not simplification but acknowledgment of complexity. Art succeeds when it makes us feel less alone with our truths, not when it tells us what our truths should mean.

The ultimate measure of testimonial cinema may lie not in its political effectiveness but in its capacity to create lasting space for historical memory—memory that honors both the specificity of individual experience and the broader patterns of political violence that continue to shape our world. In this light, I'm Still Here offers a model for how cinema can serve historical memory without betraying its complexity, providing testimony that speaks across national and temporal boundaries while remaining true to the irreducible reality of lived experience.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley is a documentary filmmaker and writer whose work focuses on Latin American cultural and political history. His films have been distributed internationally through major educational and commercial platforms.