Every Document of Civilization

At a crossroads marking the edge of Buenos Aires, nightly routines unfold amid traffic, lights and passing crowds. The testimony of a mother whose son was killed by police ruptures this ordinary landscape, invoking shared visions of Jules Verne. This film is an excavation of memory and place where the state disappeared Luciano Arruga.

Tatiana Mazú González: 'For me, it was impossible for this not to be a dark film — I am dark by nature. It revolves around the figure of the disappeared under democracy, police violence, racism and class violence. Density, sadness and anger were inevitable. Night, earth, engines and asphalt became its raw materials.

Working with my comrades in the collective, we continued obsessions with noise, machines and geology: stones, sand, mines, caves. When I met Mónica, her voice felt crystalline — luminous yet mineral.

I realised I had to search for light within this subterranean film. The struggle of the Family and Friends of Luciano Arruga is not only against state and police violence toward young people in working-class neighbourhoods, but for poetry, imagination, the future and freedom. That was when the idea of imagination as a political tool began to take shape in the film, in a country where a young person dies at the hands of the police less than every 24 hours.'

— Excerpted, translated and adapted from 'Palabras de la realizadora (Words from the Director)', The Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires Online Programme