When Nicolás Gil asked the interviewees in his documentary how many people they had thrown into the sea, they all asked him to cut the camera and then they responded: “We can’t talk about a number, but we can talk about how many flights there were.” Every week, one flight from the ESMA (Navy School of Mechanics) and two from Campo de Mayo left with people who were thrown into the sea. Like this for five years. That gives the dimension of what the director of Transfers, a documentary about the horror of the so-called death flights, describes them as the “most terrible methodology of state terrorism.” The sea brought some 65 bodies to its shores, the first to Uruguay five weeks after the military coup in Argentina, in March 1976. Nicolás Gil, born in December 1983, just four days before the arrival of democracy in his country, and son of one of the judges who tried the Military Junta, presented the first documentary of his career at the recent San Sebastián festival.
Ask. When were you aware of the horror of the military dictatorship?
Answer. From a very young age. My father was a judge, my mother worked as a social worker in courts and was involved in the first returns of kidnapped grandchildren. I knew all my life what had happened. In my family, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the human rights organizations, were always defended.
P. Did they talk normally in your family?
R. It was a regular conversation. My father was very radical and my mother was very Peronist, so at home there was always debate, a respectful debate and ideas. All of this leads me to want to talk about it.
P. His father was one of the judges who tried the Argentine military leadership. You were a child. Do you have any specific memories?
R. Not from those moments, I do have flashes of the subsequent group moments with the judges who participated, who became very friends with my father, as well as with prosecutor Strassera. Years later, from time to time they would get together to eat at home and drink and laugh and remember.
P. How did the family experience the fact that your father participated in that historic trial?
R. He wanted to be there, of course, and my mother pushed him a lot to do so. We were a family of four children and my father worked in the private sector, since salaries in public justice were less high. But it was a family decision for my father to participate in that trial, regardless of the difficulties. There were threats, cars that passed in front of the judges’ homes, we lived in a somewhat weak democracy, but he had to be there.
P. Con Transfers premieres in the documentary. What led you to it?
R. The theme. The flights of death move me. When we began to investigate, we discovered that the methodology of these death flights was something that had already been thought about before the military coup. The first flights happened two weeks after the coup and that seemed tremendous to me. People have to know the facts and evidence, beyond opinions and subjectivities. I have approached him with all the respect and love possible. I felt that I could do it and that it had to do with me and my history, because I am a son of democracy.
P. What good have you found in documentary films compared to fiction films?
R. It is a different language in which you have to focus only on facts and proven data. Maybe fiction reaches more people, like the movie 1985 directed by Santiago Miter about the trial of the dictatorship, but investigating the historical truth from the documentary is truly relevant. In the case of Transfersthe archive, as a social and political context, became another character and that, as a fiction director, seemed amazing to me.
P. It premiered in cinema with a short film Lost identity about the identity theft of babies born in prison and her first feature film was about Estela de Carlotto, the president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. Are you obsessed with the dictatorship?
R. The Argentine dictatorship passes through me. If we do not understand as a society that history and our identity have to do with the things that happened to us and that continue to happen to us, we will never be able to solve them. There are wounds that will not heal until I know where all the grandchildren are, where all the bodies thrown into the sea on death flights are, until it is known who threw those bodies. There can be no cracks. We all have to unite so that this is solved, not to stay in the past, but to look forward.
P. Is there still much to investigate in the dictatorship?
R. Lot. There is a pact of silence. It was a civic-military coup, which had the support of companies. There is no regret. The military prisoners who are already grown up do not show regret, there has been no change in their mentality. They are still proud of what they did and all this is what gives me the need to continue talking and researching about those years.
P. Why among so many horrors caused by the dictatorship does he choose the flights of death?
R. Everything was terrible, the torture, the disappearances, the baby thefts. The death flights were of an atrocious methodology. Throwing the bodies of living people into the sea is the most sinister and perverse thing one can think of. But the flights of death have something like divine justice. That the sea has returned some bodies and more bodies of emblematic people, like the 15-year-old young man Floreal Avellaneda who appeared in Uruguay five weeks after the military coup or the French nuns. That the sea has returned those bodies so that there can be justice makes me conceive some hope. I hope soldiers and civilians see the film and dare to say something more.
P. The Government of Javier Milei has shown its support for the Argentine dictatorship. What feelings does it provoke in you?
R. Pain, a lot of pain. I think of Dorita Cortiñas, one of the mothers of Plaza de Mayo who died last May without having found her son and after a 50-year struggle. The only way to settle this issue is to call a spade a spade. The coup d’état was a civil-military coup and the dictatorship provoked crimes against humanity, state terrorism. Trying to go backwards now is a very big setback, but I think that no matter how hard they try, they will not succeed.
P. What is going to happen to Argentine cinema after the measures adopted by the Milei government?
R. It will be done with fewer resources, but it will be done. Argentine cinema always rises. It’s going to cost us and we have to fight for it. There will be fewer films in the coming years, we will film with cell phones, but we will do it. We Argentines know how to reinvent ourselves. The president has to understand that he governs for everyone and that culture and cinema are a fundamental part of society and that, furthermore, it is a right of the people.