La Guardería is a documentary about the Cuban house for Montoneros’s children
POINTS: 6
To tell its painful, sometime ominous, yet ultimately life affirming story, the Argentine documentary La guardería, by Virginia Croato, goes to back to 1978 in Havana, Cuba, at a time where the Argentine military dictatorship was at the peak of its powers.
It is then when an especially prepared day care centre was set up by the Cuban government for children aged between six months and 10 years whose parents were Montoneros militants fighting against the Argentine dictatorship in what was called the Counteroffensive.
Croatto, the director, was also one of those many kids and she’s selected a group of many others to give their valuable testimonies to an audience — perhaps for the first time ever — and thus memory is kept alive. Those kids are now adults and so are the people who took care of them then, who also give their testimonies. Speaking up for the camera, their speech is calm and reflexive, never belligerent or furious. Which makes sense for La guardería is no piece of agit-prop, but instead an honest account meant to have viewers reflect upon what’s said and so allow them to draw their own conclusions.
While it’s true that this documentary is quite conventional in its film as it resorts to archive footage, super 8mm footage, voice over and testimonies, it’s equally true that its heart lies somewhere else. It’s certainly not its film form what matters the most — though it would’ve been great if a more creative approach had been taken — but what makes the difference here is the way these individuals recall their past and in so doing they draw a panorama of the past of an entire generation marked by one of the most infamous times in Argentine history.
On the minus side, at times the incidental music is a bit unnecessary and so comes across as too easy a way to underscore feelings and sentiments, which is compensated by the fact that the filmmaker never goes for blows below the belt in depicting such a harsh reality.
So you could say that all in all La guardería is an honest, often heartwarming story of a different childhood with aching, bittersweet memories and unfulfilled dreams.
Production notes:
La Guardería (Argentina/Cuba, 2015). Directed by Virgina Croatto. Written by Gustavo Alonso upon an original idea by David Blaustein and Virginia Croatto. Cinematography; Marcelo Iaccarino, Ignacio Masllorens. Editing: Lucas D’Alo, Virgina Croatto. Music: Nicolás Sorín. Sound: Carlos Olmedo. Running time: 70 minutes.
@pablsuarez
