Bechis Returns After 10 Years with 'Back to Buenos Aires' — SkimNews
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- Marco Bechis returned to directing after 10 years with 'Back to Buenos Aires,' revisiting the same dictatorship-era concentration-camp terrain as his 1999 film 'Garage Olimpo.'
- The film follows Mariano Guerra (played by Adriano Giannini), an Italian doctor and former prisoner who resists returning to Argentina to testify about his 3-plus years in Garage Olimpo before finally agreeing.
- Flashbacks depict a younger medical student Mariano (Eduardo Hoy) working for the Resistance alongside Muneca (Olivia Nuss), whose daughter Evelyn (Veronica Gerez) later presses him in the present for information about her disappeared mother.
- Mariano recognizes his chief Garage Olimpo tormentor, Dr. K (Adrian Fondari), working as a hospital doctor, confronting the survival guilt the film centers on.
- The review faults the film as an uneasy horror-film-noir hybrid whose silences mirror decades of post-dictatorship silence, and praises Amalia Mendez's (Ana Celentano) dignified testimony as the film's strongest moment.
Why it matters: Bechis is one of the few directors to have drawn on personal experience of Argentina's military dictatorship — he was himself caught up in the nightmare — making his first film in a decade a rare auteur return to testimony cinema. The mixed review suggests his comeback adds a hallucinatory, guilt-driven coda to the genre he helped define with 'Garage Olimpo' but doesn't fully recapture that earlier film's visceral grip.
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