August 1972.
Rawson´s maximum security prison.
The Argentine Patagonia.
The runaway plan of more than a hundred political prisoners under the military dictatorship has started off.
Some of them succeeded in reaching the nearby airport in Trelew, their exit door to the socialist Chile.
The rest of them would have a different fate.
Trelew is a breaking point, an omen of what would come next
in a country that will never be the same.
Why work on a difficult subject , hushed up for years?
Why be involved in questions that time has turned into a malediction topic?
These were questions we wondered again and again, when the team that
produced Trelew persisted in finding out more and more about it.
Why Trelew?
Just because.
Or in any case another question: why not?
And here the answer is easy: Trelew explains the present to us, Trelew tells us about a generation that made a decision to confront a national political scheme and build another one. And that generation failed, or rather, they did not let them to do it. Now the results are poverty, thousands of unemployed youths with no future at all.
Trelew explains to us.
If we read between the lines, Trelew makes clear what happened later on.
But Trelew just because, essentially, because I could not get out when I learned a bit of it, and later it was too late, I fell in love.
Yes, I fell in love with Trelew, in love with this story - not about untouchable heroes - but I fell in love with a tiny little tale , with the story telling us about the solidarity of those inhabitants in the vast Patagonia, who decided to go into a maximum security prison to take cigarettes, cheese and bread to those imprisoned youths who confronted a military dictatorship, made the revolution, laughed, played football and sang chacareras and sambas from cell to cell as well ...
Trelew, because I could not understand and wanted to explain to me the strength of those who had lost everything - their children - and however they stood fast on their two legs, to fight against Brigadier-General Lanusse´s dictatorship, and shout in his face that , despite the official versions, that had been an assassination, a coward mass execution.
Trelew because I was touched by the attitude of Eduardo Capello´s mother , who had lost her two sons … and also by Tito´s look, a resident who was obstinate in being solidary with those youths and ended up imprisoned in the same penitentiary.
And also Trelew, because, when I read in an old publication the recollections of María Angélica Sabelli´s father (Angélica was one of the youths who was riddled with bullet holes and only twenty-three years old), who could not remember where he last had kissed her daughter, whether it had been on her forehead or on her cheek, then I could not stop retelling this story.
Mariana Arruti
Director
The critics say:
**** " A MASTERPIECE" EXCELLENT
by Miguel Russo, from Veintitrés Magazine
" STRONG ... the strength of the most vivid and exciting adventure story"
Horacio Bernades, Página 12
by Horacio Bernades, from Página 12 Magazine
"Very good ... it carries you as if through a time tunnel to the moment and the place".
by Jorge Belaunzarán, from TXT Magazine.
" ... the narrative strength of a political thriller in the style of Costa Gavras."
by Diego Lerer, from the Clarín.
" ... An excellent film. The Argentine film industry had never dared to it."
by Fernando Martín Peña, from Rolling Stone Magazine.
"Trelew ... powerful."
by Lilian Ivachow, from EL AMANTE Magazine.
No Navy officer accepted an interview on the
events of August 22 nd. At the Adm. Zar Base
Even though censorship was absolute and journalists were persecuted, from the outset, the whole folk suspected who were the ones to blame for the Trelew massacre.
The Argentine Navy refused to issue
a statement for this film
The military dictatorship, leaded by Brigadier General Lanusse, replied to Rawson runaway and the popular support to the revolutionary movements with the mass assassination of sixteen political prisoners.
Until today, there has been no
inquiry or legal process
against those involved in the events narrated here
