Memory and mediation in Los rubios: a contemporary perspective on the Argentine dictatorship

This article analyses the particular contribution made to post-dictatorship memory by one of the most innovative films to have emerged in Argentina in recent years, Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003). It examines ways in which the film’s reflexivity and its subversion of cinematic conventions become essential to its reworking of the themes of memory, absence and identity. The film comments explicitly on the difficulty of its own production, and indeed the debates surrounding the funding and distribution of Los rubios reveal with unusual clarity the complexity of relationships between aesthetic, political and economic interests in contemporary Argentine film-making.