‘Back to Buenos Aires’ Venice Review: The Long Shadow of the Dictatorship

Back in 1999, Garage Olimpo premiered at the Cannes Film Festival before opening in theaters. It was a harrowing, unflinching film about the arrests and torture carried out during Argentina’s military dictatorship, focusing specifically on the clandestine detention center known as El Olimpo. Its director, Marco Bechis—born in Chile to an Italian family—had himself been imprisoned in a similar facility. While the central story was fictional, the terrifying world it depicted was deeply rooted in real events and in Bechis’s own experience. More than a quarter-century later comes Ritorno a Buenos Aires, a film that functions less as a direct sequel than as a continuation of the Garage Olimpo «universe».

This new Italian-Brazilian co-production—a partnership that, not coincidentally, reflects the current political and economic realities of Argentine filmmaking—turns to a different chapter in the long history of prosecuting the dictatorship’s crimes against humanity. Rather than revisiting the trials portrayed in Argentina, 1985, it focuses on the prosecutions that resumed during the 2000s after the 1986 and 1987 so-called «impunity laws» were struck down. Drawing, perhaps even more than his debut feature, on his own experience—Bechis himself returned from Italy to testify—the film follows an Italian doctor living in Turin who is summoned back to Argentina to testify at the trial of the men who abducted and tortured him.

Despite the obvious parallels —and the many recurring names, including several returning actors— the case is different from Bechis’s own and from the one depicted in Garage Olimpo. The protagonist this time is Mariano Guerra (Adriano Giannini, son of the legendary Giancarlo Giannini), a lonely, deeply troubled Italian physician who, after repeatedly refusing requests to testify, finally agrees to return to Buenos Aires. Housed in a hotel alongside other survivors awaiting their appearances in court, Mariano gradually relives fragments of his captivity through a series of flashbacks while struggling with fear, uncertainty and emotional paralysis as the day of his testimony approaches.

The film’s most compelling—and perhaps most unsettling—aspect is the revelation that Mariano, as hinted by the way some of the other witnesses treat him, eventually «collaborated» with his captors after enduring prolonged imprisonment, torture and every imaginable form of abuse. That fact, combined with his apparent role in the disappearance of a fellow detainee —whose daughter is still searching for answers and confronts him directly— forces him to question not only whether he should testify but also what part he played in those events. Could he have resisted? Or does the physical and psychological violence inflicted upon him fundamentally alter the moral judgment of his actions?

More than anything else, the film is an inward journey into Mariano’s fractured psyche, using his experience —and those of others like him— to explore the lingering consequences of state terror. Those consequences are psychological, but also social. Guilt, shame and even self-loathing haunt him as he exists in a strange limbo, waiting for the trial while moving through conversations, interviews and memories of the years he spent in captivity.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is the oppressive atmosphere surrounding both Mariano and the entire judicial process. The nearly empty hotel where witnesses await their testimony, the meetings with lawyers and even the conversations between characters all unfold in bleak, almost desolate spaces that feel less like realistic locations than externalizations of Mariano’s state of mind. In this way, Bechis alternates between historically specific moments—those directly connected to the trial and the witnesses’ testimony—and more subjective passages that illuminate the profound psychological and even moral turmoil experienced by those involved.

Unlike Garage Olimpo—a far rawer, more immediate and more realistic film—Back to Buenos Aires is inevitably constrained by the fact that, apart from a handful of aerial shots, it could not be filmed in the Argentine capital. The result is an even more enclosed, claustrophobic work, with Bechis confining his characters to oppressive interiors and turning the film into a more intimate psychological drama. Ana Celentano, Verónica Gerez and Olivia Nuss all make valuable contributions, playing another witness, the daughter of one of the disappeared, and, in Nuss’s case, «Muñeca,» who appears in the film’s flashbacks.

Although both films share a dense, oppressive darkness, what distinguishes Back to Buenos Aires is a moral ambiguity every bit as disturbing as that of Garage Olimpo. The earlier film already ventured into similar territory through the complex relationship between Antonella Costa’s and Carlos Echeverría’s characters, but here that ambiguity becomes the film’s central concern. Bechis remains just as unsparing in his portrayal of the perpetrators. Adrián Fondari and Marcelo Chaparro, both of whom appeared in the original film, return here, with Fondari playing a role that is as pivotal as it is chilling. In fact, the accused bear the same names as the characters from Garage Olimpo.

What the film never quite recaptures is the impact of its predecessor. Its pacing is slower, its visual approach more conventional and some of its dialogue occasionally feels strained. Yet despite those shortcomings, Ritorno a Buenos Aires succeeds in making one thing unmistakably clear: the crimes committed during Argentina’s dictatorship —including the trauma carried by those who survived— remain deeply embedded in the country’s collective consciousness. At a time when political leaders once again seek to deny or relativize the atrocities of those years, films like this remind us that these are not wounds confined to a distant past. Half a century after the events, the wounds opened during those years of state terror have still not healed. And they probably never will.