Call : Portrait of an Argentine Woman

Omtale

Buenos Aires, 1976: anti-dictatorship militant Silvia Labayru is kidnapped by paramilitary soldiers and taken to a clandestine detention centre. She is twenty years old, and five months pregnant. There she is tortured, gives birth on a table, is repeatedly abused by an officer and forced to collaborate in a military operation that results in the disappearance of five people. From the start, Labayru is certain she will be killed, until she is granted a phone call to her father that changes everything. Over a year later, she is freed and goes into exile in Madrid, thinking that the hell is over. Yet she is fiercely condemned by her fellow Argentines as a collaborator, insistently faced with the question: what did you do to survive? Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero spent two years interviewing Labayru and her family, friends, children, lovers, and ex-militants. Accounts conflict, memories falter, interviews veer from seemingly stray details to the most profound experiences of terror and suffering, and Guerriero weaves it all into an astonishingly multi-faceted, complex portrait of Labayru. This is a story of the very limit points of human experience, of violence, captivity and struggle; but it also becomes a story of love, reconciliation and survival in the face of extremity.