A scene from Fernando Díaz’s documentary Monumento.
By Pablo Suárez
For the Herald
Back in 2009, the National Culture Secretariat launched a public competition for proposals to design and build the National Monument to the Victims of the Holocaust. The winners were architects Gustavo Nielsen and Sebastián Marsiglia, who presented an attention-grabbing, life-affirming project that mirrored some key aspects of the Holocaust. Later on, Argentine filmmaker Fernando Díaz (Plaza de almas) produced, wrote, directed, and photographed the documentary Monumento, which chronicles the development of the project and construction of the monument while it establishes a fresh, colloquial dialogue with a handful of survivors from the Shoah living today in Buenos Aires.
So on the one hand, the protagonists of Monumento are the people who survived the Holocaust, many of them members of the Argentine organization Generations from the Shoah, directed by Diana Wang and made up of volunteers, whose goal is to keep the memory alive by researching, educating and communicating the legacy of the Holocaust to the new generations. In fact, one of its main activities is the Proyecto Aprendiz (the Apprentice Project) in which Holocaust survivors pair up and engage in an ongoing dialogue with young people, and so the new generations become witnesses themselves — “Whoever listens to a witness, becomes a witness,” as Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel used to say.
People at large and, more to the point, survivors who narrate their stories, don’t just disseminate information, but instead they interact, raise queries, and send a message also inspired by the questions asked. And as regards the content, Monumento smartly sets itself apart from many documentaries of this type since, instead of zooming in on the infamous atrocities endured by the victims, it chooses to focus on their stories about getting their strength back, arriving in a new country, starting a new family, and getting their hope back. In short, it’s all about celebrating life after death in a very down to earth manner.
So there are no blows below the belt whatsoever, no manipulation through a display of human pain, no condescending commiseration. Which is not to say pain is left out of the picture, but rather it’s only referred to when strictly necessary. In fact, there are a few moments when an unexpected clever note of humour brushes off any attempt at solemnity or pomposity.
On the other hand, Díaz examines the many steps taken to design and build the monument in Buenos Aires — in turn, it also takes a look at the one in Berlin in order to draw some political correlations. Architects Nielsen and Marsiglia speak about the intentions and characteristics of the monument, which is welcomed by many but at the same time some survivors feel it doesn’t represent the magnitude of the darkness in which they were immersed. And that’s when it should be remembered that the monument is not about death, but about remembering those who survived.
Conventionally shot by all standards, Monumento is a vivid document of a collective tragedy rather than a film essay or an auteur work, so its merits lay in the realm of what it says and how neatly it says it.
Production notes
Monumento (Argentina, 2016). Written and directed by Fernando Díaz. Narrated by Juan Palomino. With Gustavo Nielsen, Sebastian Marsiglia, Diana Wang, Aida Ender, Wanda Holsman. Cinematography: Alan Endler, Claudio Ramos, Fernando Díaz. Editing: Emiliano Serra. Running time: 75 minutes.
@pablsuarez
