The Official Story

1985 [SPANISH]

Action / Drama / History / War

17
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 100% · 13 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 89% · 2.5K ratings
IMDb Rating 7.7/10 10 11407 11.4K

husband wife relationship buenos aires, argentina family secrets high school teacher military dictatorship history teacher

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Plot summary

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1983. In the last and turbulent days of the military dictatorship, Alicia, a high school history teacher, begins to ask uncomfortable questions about the dark origins of Gaby, her adopted daughter.

Director

Luis Puenzo Photo
Luis Puenzo

Top cast

Héctor Alterio Photo
Héctor Alterio as Roberto
Marcos Woinsky Photo
Marcos Woinsky as
Pablo Rago Photo
Pablo Rago as
Norma Aleandro Photo
Norma Aleandro as Alicia
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
958.57 MB
1280*688
Spanish 2.0
NR
Subtitles
24 fps
1 hr 52 min
Seeds 1
1.82 GB
1904*1024
Spanish 2.0
NR
Subtitles
24 fps
1 hr 52 min
Seeds 12

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by howard.schumann

A film of shattering power

In the powerful 1985 film The Official Story, Director Luis Puenzo tells the story of a teacher's awakening to conscience at the end of Argentina's "Dirty War" of the late 70s and early 80s. As in Pinochet's Chile, the military secret police sought to consolidate their power by routinely torturing and murdering students, political activists, opponents of the regime, and even expectant mothers. Many ended up as desaparecidos, people taken by the government and not returned. The film is about one mother's search for the truth about her adopted daughter and her discovery brings harsh political reality very close to home.In The Official Story, Alicia (Norma Aleandro) lives a comfortable middle class life. She teaches History to high school students and enjoys a family that includes her well-to-do husband Roberto (Hector Alterio) and 5-year old adopted daughter Gaby (Analia Castro). Not used to asking questions, she believes whatever she has read in history books and is confused when one of her students tells her that "history is written by assassins." She sees the demonstrations of the "Mothers of Plaza de Mayo", a group seeking information about missing family members but remains uninvolved. When her friend Ana (Chunchuna Villafane) visits after living in exile for many years, however, she learns, in an intensely emotional scene, that Ana had been imprisoned and tortured by the police trying to locate her husband, a suspected "subversive". Ana tells Alicia that many others had "disappeared" and that babies had been taken from their mothers and given to childless friends of the junta. Alicia begins to wonder if her own child was the daughter of a political victim and questions her husband but when he is evasive, she suspects that he may be hiding a dark secret. Although fearful at the prospect of losing Gaby, Alicia is determined to find out about her daughter's past and begins to search hospital records and government archives. Ultimately, she must confront her own responsibility in a climax of shattering force that underscores the tragedy of political ideologues who would rather destroy family solidarity than risk losing power.
Reviewed by

Reviewed by AlaveWall 9 / 10

Overcoming the banality of evil, corruption in adoption

La Historia Official is a well-made film about awakening from passive complicity in evil, in this case, forced adoption. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo were and are an inspiration to those who struggle to uncover and resist abuses in adoption practices, be they the enslaved Irish women of the Magdalen laundries or the many indigenous peoples who had children forcibly removed from homes to be adopted by whites. Most of adoption does not involve abduction, but to turn a blind eye to the fact that it does exist, is to be passively complicit, as was the protagonist in this film.

The scene in which the teacher realizes that tremendous evil has indeed been perpetrated, and that she may very well be the beneficiary of such evil, is staggering. Norma Aleandro is a talented enough actress that we believe her initial rejection of this revelation, and her gradual evolution from passive cohort to courageous seeker of the truth.

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