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La Ciénaga

Mario on Tour


            It is 2001. An Argentinian lawyer and her beloved younger brother go to a hospital to sign papers permitting a doctor to take their elderly father to be taken off artificial life support. Pablo wants to learn more about the father he barely knew before signing the papers, but Melena has no such affection or curiousity about their father. Melena must agree to Pablo's demands in order to gain Pablo's consent to sign the papers. Pablo convinces Melena to take their father's old car on a 2000-mile road trip from Buenos Aires to Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego. On the journey the siblings slowly uncover the dark secrets of families who suffered the horror of a repressive political regime. We slowly uncover the family's past through Pablo's discovery of a notebook in which someone has recorded the murders, kidnapping, and torture of his victims. At first we believe that this is a deranged serial killer, but soon we realize that these methodical murders were committed during a period of political persecution of Communists in Argentina in the early 1980s. As if in a time warp, the past begins to fade into the present, and the present moves into the past. The siblings witness the ghosts of the political victims murdered 20 years ago as if the events were unfolding in the present. Pablo repeatedly tries to save two of the fully-materialized ghosts by removing them from the scene of their impending murder, but the ghosts are murdered again by an invisible force that will not permit Pablo to change the historical outcome. All ghosts of people who were killed in the past are murdered once again in the present in the same way they died 20 years ago. Pablo and Melena soon realize that the author of the notebook and the murderer was none other than their own father. An apparition of their father as a younger man and the siblings in the present time begin to encounter one another through this time warp. The father tortures and tries to kill the siblings, addressing them as though they were political prisoners from the past. We witness the equivalent of waterboarding and other torture techniques used by many military forces around the world, including American forces with Middle Eastern prisoners. While she is escaping from her torturer, Melena witnesses the ghost of her younger father who 20 years ago callously cut a fetus out of a female prisoner (who dies minutes later). The father's ghost holds the baby and claims him as his own son, then names him, "Pablo." Soon after, Melena rescues Pablo from their ghost father's torture chamber and brings him to the same hospital where their father's body lies in a coma. Pablo is dying from the injuries inflicted on him by his ghost father, and Melena believes that the only way to save Pablo is to disconnect her father from life support herself so that he can no longer cause any harm. Only when the father dies does Pablo begins to recover from his wounds. Melena and Pablo now realize that they actually are children of their father's tortured or murdered political prisoners, not their father's biological children. In the final scene of the movie, many of the ghosts of victims murdered during this period of political repression become visible to Melena and Pablo in the streets of an Argentinian city during daylight. Pablo tells Melena that he believes the new century will bring an end to the suffering, torture and murder of ordinary citizens. He asks Melena what year it is, having just come out of a 2-week coma himself. She replies that it is September 10, 2001.
    

Leonora Balcarce

Leonora Balcarce Movies or Tv Shows (upto Nov 2024) - Watch Online

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