Ulises de la Orden has spent the last few years trying to tell the story of the historic Juntas Trial that took place in Argentina in 1985, summarizing 530 hours of footage in a three-hour documentary.

With a vast career as a documentary filmmaker, he did not imagine that a fiction film like Argentina, 1985 would tell that same story in such a brilliant way as to win the 2023 Golden Globe for Best Picture – Non-English Language.

El juicio (The Trial) was presented at the recently concluded Berlin International Film Festival, having become an excellent complement to Santiago Mitre’s film for those who want to see what the reality of that historical event was like, recreated in fiction by Ricardo Darín and Peter Lanzani.

In a Zoom conversation from the German capital, de la Orden explained to us what it was like to tell the story without elements beyond what happened in front of the cameras.

 

How important is it that El juicio had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival?

We wanted the Berlinale to pave the way for El juicio because I consider it the most important festival we could aspire to. When they informed us that the film had been scheduled in the Forum section, it was greatly fulfilling.

Later, they told us that in addition, El juicio was going to compete for the Berlinale Documentary Award. So, it was a double joy to know that we were nominated in that category.

With my previous work, I had never been to a festival of this magnitude so I am more than happy and satisfied, especially with the quality of the projections and the people you deal with because they all saw the film. They know what they are talking about and that inspires an enormous warm treatment towards us.

In that sense, everything was impeccable. I had two screenings in Berlin and they were the first times that the film was screened with an audience. Even at the premiere, it was the first time that I sat down to see the film as completely finished on a cinema screen. That was very fulfilling.

For me, the public reception was ideal. There is an enormous understanding, not only of the films but of Argentine history, of the context of what El juicio means and of what the material speaks of even without speaking, and which is reflected in subsequent talks.

The truth is that there is a great eagerness among the viewers to learn more. Everything is turning into an awesome experience.

It is unquestionable that the interest in the documentary is driven by the success of Argentina, 1985. The fictional film about the trial has also had an unexpected trajectory. At what point did you know that the two projects could coincide in their release to the public?

I found out that they were preparing Argentina, 1985 in the middle of my work. I started with the idea of doing this project about 10 years ago or so. In 2015, I started looking for the material and only in 2019 did I have everything I needed and the financing to get started.

While we were reviewing the material, which took nine months of work, I found out that they were starting to shoot Argentina, 1985. This film was a great way to open up the subject, not only for the Argentine public but for the entire world. Today, in all parts of the planet, they know that there was a Trial of the Juntas.

How hard was it to look at the 530 hours of material not only from the practical point of view but from what was heard in all those testimonials?

I did not do the work alone. There were three of us and that helped me to digest it. We spent nine months looking at the material together with the editor Alberto Ponce and Gisela Peláez, the assistant director.

It was really hard to watch and there was a moment during the process when I had a recurring dream with one of the most beautiful, but at the same time most terrible, images of Garage Olimpo. I think I even told the director Marco Bechis about it.

When you see the blue sky and the plane is flying with the music of Aurora and bodies begin to fall. I used to wake up in the middle of a horrible nightmare. It was terrible.

What were the criteria when choosing how much of the 530 hours would remain in the documentary?

We basically worked on the edition with two central ideas: the first was that the trial had a staging and judicial dramaturgy but that the chronology was not useful for the story it tells. We put together our own dramatic structure.

And the second big decision was to work on the issues that were dealt with in the trial, almost completely ignoring the cases themselves. Those were the premises.

Afterward, it was like any editing process, especially when you are working on such material, with the delicacy and length that it had. It was all trial and error. Understanding how we put together the narrative structure to be able to tell this story.

What’s interesting is that you had a lot of villains in the story, not just the individuals on trial but also the defense attorneys, right?

This thing about villains is a bit like that, although, for example, Jorge Rafael Videla did not have a defense attorney and did not speak. The defense strategy throughout the entire trial was to lie, deny everything and try to stop the trial at any cost.

They were trying to interrupt it all the time. I think that this is one of the great achievements – the fact of having managed to make it happen.

That is part of the judicial staging that is very interesting, the conflict is very clear, the forces that enter into opposition are at stake, they have a voice and are represented by protagonists or antagonists who are the judges.

We did a pretty deep job on the one hand to show them. And on the other, also to give them a certain degree of intelligence because the more powerful, in narrative terms, the force that opposes, the more powerful the force that you invest in to overcome what it has to.

We were preparing everything with that idea in mind. The big difference in the documentary is that you work with material that is already filmed. It’s all montage while in fiction, you direct the actors trying to reproduce some reality that you investigated.

None of these lawyers, nor the defendants, nor the witnesses, are the people who are registered in that file. They are cuts about that reality.

One of the things that caught my attention about your documentary was the decision not to identify the participants, except when someone says it verbally. So the Argentine viewer from that generation has an advantage because they can recognize a lot of people. But for people in Germany, they have no idea who they are. Why did you decide to do it that way?

It’s a good question because it was one of the issues we worked on by trial and error. At one point, I was convinced that I had to identify everyone.

But when we began to try how to do it, the amount of information on the material was such that it already had a lot of things that were very difficult to digest – inserting a text into it was horrible for us. You just don’t feel like listening to anything that’s being said in this movie.

I must admit that many people we love and respect suggested that we identify at least some of them – for example, Cristino Nicolaides. It is not the same for him to say, “I am a military professional,” as for you to say that he was head of the army.

In the end, the decision I ended up making was not to identify anyone because my bet was that, if the story is well put together, you have to identify to what force each testimony responds, who each one is and for whom they play.

There are some soldiers who speak as witnesses and not as defendants. There was a lot to show about them. In fact, you hear Vice Admiral Luís Mendía, who is the mastermind of the “death flights,” declaring it and it seems that he is an English lord, a proper and elegant guy.

But the information was that if we had to identify everything, the perception of the film would be completely distorted. I am convinced that I made the right decision because a movie is nothing more than that, and I cannot tell everything in three hours.

In addition, this also has to work as a fuse for researchers and people who are interested in knowing more. That’s why the end credits are very specific.

The trial is also a gateway to learning about what happened in Argentina during the last dictatorship and how Argentines began to deal with our past after the Trial of the Juntas. It is a justice process that is still ongoing.

In your opinion, what is the importance of this trial for Argentine society?

There is a very interesting phrase that prosecutors Julio César Strassera and Luis Moreno Ocampo say in the final argument: “Without a trial, there is no crime.”

Therefore, all the people who were tortured and murdered by the military dictatorship, by the Argentine State, died innocent and we do not know how many there are because they took care not to leave any records.

We estimate some 30,000 that we do not know in what conditions they died because there was no trial. It seems to me that justice with the Trial of the Juntas showed us that it has the power to change the destiny of the people.

We made a trial with ordinary courts, with ordinary officials, with ordinary laws and with a fragile and newborn democracy, with all the guarantees that the Republic could offer to the nine commanders, those who had no mercy on anyone.

It seems to me that there is a qualitative leap in the civility of our society that, democratically and in peace, was able to initiate this process of justice.

What was the scene or fragment that was too hard for you to leave out?

I think that an infinite number of films are hidden in these 530 hours of archive. I hope that now, when we finish unifying a copy in 4K, a lot of directors and actors will be interested in this archive to make more films, series and other things.

It was challenging to get a lot of things out but there are others that were not narrated in the trial and that deserve to be told, such as the whole episode of the Seré Mansion. And although there is the film Crónica de una fuga, there is a tremendous documentary that can be done from this file.

There is also something very powerful in the Posadas Hospital part. There are bits of all of this in the film but since we made the decision not to work on cases in particular because if we delved into them, we would have a 40-hour film. There’s no way to have that.

The testimonies are all so terrible and at the same time with such audiovisual power that a feature film could be made with any of the cases and with the same archive material.

Translated by Mario Amaya