Argentina and Cristina Kirchner take the Mostra with a dry, sober and profound exercise of pain and memory

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recalls

that a year after the brutal dictatorship of his country was settled, a civil court, not a military one, dared the unthinkable: judge the executioners of the greatest of affronts;

of the most unreal, cruel and cowardly of crimes.

He also remembers that while those most responsible for the genocide took the stand, that was it and that was made clear by prosecutor

in his already historic allegation, the middle managers --those who with their own hands kidnapped, tortured, raped, humiliated and finally murdered-- found themselves free alongside precisely the surviving victims.

And what most strikes the Argentine director, above the seriousness and depth of the above, is that, despite the painful vividness of his memory, there are so few who still remember it.

And for that,

And then there is the recent attack on

which only adds confusion to what has been experienced and to the film itself.

Add the revelation that, in effect, in Argentina or here next door, and despite the passage of time, we have not moved from the site.

"It seemed," reflects Mitre, "that after what happened in the history of my country, violence, finally, had ceased to be an option. Well, the attack has returned us to the past."

And so.

Go ahead, it is one of those productions so attentive to the material they handle, so respectful of every word said and written, that at times they seem condemned to their destiny of, as the poet would say, to stir their brains.

And wake up.

But it is precisely this utilitarian nature of a tool for the common good that makes it stand up and, most importantly, live.

Someone could say that it belongs to that diffuse and necessarily clumsy genre

and, if only for once and without precedent, there is no other choice but to agree with it.

'Argentina, 1985'

is basically a movie that hurts.

It hurts what is heard from some of the 833 witnesses who recorded the misadventure of the more than 30,000 disappeared.

It is even irritating because of the clarity with which it leaves shared oblivion in front of the viewer.

Nothing seems to have been learned and the temptation to make the same mistakes is still there.

But, above all, it hurts from simple and pure pain.

The script written by four hands between the director and the encyclopedic filmmaker

it just gets carried away.

Or that's the idea.

What happened is so enormous, so hurtful, so literal, that what is understood by narration seems like another way of naming the imposture.

The tortured go up to the platform of the trial and tell their tortures.

The relatives of those who vanished remember the night in which the lives of theirs and their own were kidnapped.

The judge reads what he once read before the entire universe ("Never again," he concluded).

And the dead attend.

Let's say that the only luxury that the film allows itself outside the script, which is its stubborn and dry script (so to speak), is the drift of some other memorable secondary (the prosecutor's teenage son) and the crackling of the dialogues against the current in mouth of always in place

The rest is the essential and the essential is everything that at the time, in 1985, was the rest.

And so.

It is true that the occasional excess of

and

Miter abandons (or leaves aside, better) many of the findings of his more political filmography, such as the use of silence in

or the depth of the moral dilemma in his 'remake' of

or the taste for the labyrinths in

Now the frontality, the clarity and the instability of memory matter.

And in this altar, perhaps a more elaborate, more particular, more Miter look is sacrificed.

Either way, the memory remains.

They would already want other countries.

The memory remains and, most importantly, the pain remains.

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(Italy), 09/03/Sigourney Weaver at the photocall for 'Master Gardner', by Paul Schrader.CLAUDIO ONORATIEFE

MASTER PAUL SCHRADER

At his side, the official section also presented up to three more films.

All of them, without being definitive what is always aspired to in a festival, interesting.

Definitely.

In order of relevance for the photographers, the first one was

the new work by

that, out of competition, will help the filmmaker receive an honorary award for his career.

In it he completes the trilogy that began with '

followed with a firm step in

and concludes with this story of a gardener more obsessive than faithful.

Joel Edgerton

and an always majestic

are the masters of ceremonies of this story -which is really already a ritual- of meticulous men in their respective trades (in order: priest, gambler and horticulturist) with a hunger for redemption because of a very dark past.

No one can accuse Schrader of improvising or seeking what is now called "a new experience."

The Smartbox Gift Boxes from the former scriptwriter of

never come as a surprise.

The result is, once again, a faithful x-ray of a common emptiness that has to do with guilt, grace and forgiveness.

It sounds mystical and it is.

It's Schrader.

Much more risky, however, is the proposal by the Italian

.

'

', like the surprising and very crepuscular '

' before her, delves into the quiet mysteries of identity.

In her previous film, it was her loneliness, an old woman (majestic Charlotte Rampling) socially condemned for the sins of her husband, that served to chart a path essentially deep into the deepest and darkest.

Now it is the transgender American actress

who guides the steps to an existential adventure that has to do with family, recognition and, once again, who we are.

Identity, we said.

Trace Lysette and Patricia Clarkson on the red carpet of 'Monica'.MARCO BERTORELLOAFP

With a samurai rigor, '

' projects in a claustrophobic square format the image of a prison that very laboriously also wants to be liberation.

It tells the story of a woman who returns to her house after so many years to care for her sick mother.

She will meet her brother again, she will meet her grandchildren and her sister-in-law, and, above all, her past will return.

But she will do it dragging, with much suffering.

Coherence is the main weapon of a film that is illuminated, precise and, in its own mesmeric way, exciting.

Finally, documentary filmmaker

presented

('All the beauty and bloodshed', could be a mistranslation of the title taken from a quote from 'Heart of darkness' by Joseph Conrad ).

The director of '

', the film that testified to the work of

now follows the photographer and activist

to recount at the same time and in parallel a long series of losses: that of the protagonist's sister who committed suicide;

that of many of the artists who shaped the scene of the 80s who fell for AIDS, and that of the more than 400,000 victims caused by the opiate OxyContin thanks to the lack of scruples of the Sackler family (those in the book already know

by

which later became the series '

' on Disney+).

Poitras manages so that this supposed lack of focus with so many stories one on top of the other becomes, precisely, the greatest achievement of a sad film and, again, full, but very full, of pain.

It was, without a doubt, the theme of the day: pain,

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