New film exposes horrors of Argentina's dictatorship -- and the world's complicity
The Argentine military dictatorship's reign of terror involved torture and killings, leading to the disappearance of at least 30,000 people. Now 45 years later, the Swiss filmmaker Andreas Fontana takes the tragic Latin American historical events to the big screen to show viewers how different people and countries — including the U.S. and European countries — helped create an international state of terror.
“I think it’s important to tell this story from a morally ambiguous perspective,” Fontana said in a phone interview with NBC News about his first feature film, “Azor,” which releases nationwide at the IFC Center in New York on Friday, Sept. 10. “The story of a Swiss banker who travels to Argentina to replace a missing partner casts a much wider net that represents a system where many different countries took advantage.”
“Azor” is set in 1980 and follows Yvan De Weil (played by Fabrizio Rongione), a private banker from Geneva who travels almost 7,000 miles with his wife, Inés (Stéphanie Cléau) to Buenos Aires at the peak of the Argentinean military dictatorship's abductions and repression.
Viewers will meet the high-net-worth clients of De Weil’s former partner, and penetrate into the tense atmosphere of a society where political indiscretions could end in abrupt disappearances.
“A banker can be both respectable and elegant. But when you look at De Weil’s work, how he conducts business with clients, it can be ambiguous. And if you take into account the violence of the Argentinean dictatorship, then it is no longer ambiguous but completely murky,” Fontana said
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/new-movie-explores-global-complicity-argentinas-dirty-war-rcna1964