Points: 6
“When I was four, my father died, and the one and only icy phrase to explain his absence was: ‘Your dad died in a train accident.’ Nobody in my entire life explained to me how that accident actually happened. So little by little, the everyday silence became so intense that I got used to not asking anymore,” says Argentine filmmaker Mariana Arruti (Los llamaban los presos de Bragado, La huelga de los locos, Trelew) about her new and insightful documentary El padre (“The Father”), which seeks to fill in the void left by an absent father who has faded from his daughter memory.
More than three decades have gone by since Juan Arruti, the filmmaker’s father, died on September 13, 1973, and it’s now time to start asking questions that were left unanswered, or that were never asked to begin with. Arruti doesn’t believe the version of the accident — and not without reason. Her own mother never identified the body at the morgue, many folks claim he was too watchful a man to cross a railway without seeing the train coming, whereas others also distrust the official version for unspoken reasons. Plus the fact that Juan was being persecuted by the police because of his being a political activist is not to be taken lightly.
Narrated in the first person singular, El padre is not exactly or strictly a conventional documentary since it boasts some fictional segments and chooses a subjective point of view in portraying its subject. But it’s definitely not a fiction film either, so let’s just say it lies smoothly on the thin frontier dividing the two formats. Arruti meets with her mother, uncles, cousins, and nanny, as well as with three of her father’s comrades, who were also involved in politics. And as a non-obtrusive interviewer, she asks succinct questions and lets them go back in time to bring forward fragments to recreate a missing picture. In so doing, some interviewees cannot hide the emotions that start flowing from deep inside their hearts, and with teary eyes they say what they know about Juan Arruti.
Yet there’s no possible way to have hard information, absolutely true facts, or even conclusive statements. Because memory often fails the best of witnesses, and also because some stories have parts that are never unveiled. So it’s particularly smart for Arruti to go for a subjective point of view because in order to fill the void left by her father, all she can possibly have are images provided by those who knew him — to which she can add sounds for making a film. This way, the art of filmmaking will eventually allow for closure.
So you have sensitive, affectionate reenactments of her early days with her father, which she can only imagine, shot in elegant black and white. In slightly sepia tinted tones, there are reenactments of her days, weeks, and months following her father’s death, which are removed from the cosy or welcoming. At the very end, there’s a sweet and emotional —if restrained — segment that visually expresses what the director has accomplished in her pursuit of overcoming a traumatic absence.
One more things: unlike many documentaries filmed in a very narcissistic first person singular — where the figure of the filmmaker is too noticeable to the point of being obnoxious — Arruti knows better, and so she discreetly chooses not to take centre stage at any time. She’s after a father that was abruptly taken from her, and so the film is always about him and his absence. More to the point, it’s about getting him back in the best of way possible for her.
Production notes
El padre (Argentina, 2016) Written and directed by Mariana Arruti. With Emma Gil, Manuel Martínez Sobrado, Franco Jeremías Lara Arruti, Nadia Schmiedt y Vanina Aybar. Cinematography: Manuel Muschong. Editing: Marisa Montes. Running time: 72 minutes.
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