‘Pedro in the Land’ San Sebastian Review: Benjamín Naishtat And María Alché Trace Argentina’s Peronist Resistance Through A Son’s Memories

Argentine filmmaker Benjamín Naishtat has not one but two films at this year’s San Sebastián Film Festival, in different sections. One is Glaxo, which we already reviewed here and which plays in the official competition. The other is Pedro in the Land, a documentary he co-directed with María Alché, his partner in real life, about another couple, one who occupy a key place in the history of political resistance in Argentina: Alicia Eguren and John William Cooke.

This documenraty is built on two basic elements. The first is a set of letters the two exchanged when they were getting to know each other in the 1950s, at the height of the Peronist resistance that followed the 1955 coup. The second, and the heart of the film, is the testimony of Pedro Catella, Eguren’s son and stepson to «Bebe» Cooke, who unspools anecdotes and memories from their lives over the course of an interview the directors conduct with him today, from his home in Mexico.

The letters are read aloud in the film by Lucia Arduriz and Mariano Llinás and illustrated with archival material, mostly period photographs from both Argentina and Mexico. Pedro’s testimony, with a few exceptions, is presented as a straight, no-frills interview: Catella sits in his apartment in Mexico City’s Villa Olímpica and tells his parents’ story against the backdrop of Latin American political history from the late ’50s to the mid-’70s.

The conversation with Catella charts a course that begins after Perón’s overthrow, when Pedro was still very small, and runs to the end of the ’70s dictatorship. Along the way it takes in Cooke’s death from illness and, later, Eguren’s death at the hands of the military. In that sense, what Pedro in the Land recounts has more than one point of contact with the political history lurking behind Glaxo, which counts the José León Suárez massacre among its strongest thematic elements.

Catella’s storehouse of stories is wide-ranging. There is the information he smuggled from one country to another as a child, and the trips to the movies with Cooke to see cowboy pictures. There are tales tied to Che Guevara, who reportedly had some kind of romance with his mother, and to the various revolutionary movements across Latin America. There are also memories of Cooke making him an accomplice in his «deceptions» of his mother, whether over food or money. Together they sketch the very adult life of a small boy who became a political militant almost from the cradle, to the point that he knew how to fire a gun as a preteen.

Naishtat and Alché tell this story directly, without detours and without any visual «ornament.» It’s true that the strictly journalistic nature of the conversation can give the film a somewhat more «televisual» feel. But it’s also true that the minimalism of the staging brings a sharper political and thematic focus, which is welcome. Without much fuss, what the directors are doing is trying to keep alive the story of Cooke, Eguren and the resistance movements that, whatever their questionable methods and despite their conflicts, infighting and differences, tried to transform Argentina and Latin America.