A defibrillator, a body we don't see, a broken door in an apartment in Turin. Return to Buenos Aires opens like this, with Mariano Guerra saving someone from death whose name we will never know, nor will we know why, shortly before, that person had stopped wanting to save himself.
This prologue, suspended and faceless, is enough to understand that Marco Bechis is not interested in the heroic gesture, but in what comes after: in the life that remains when one has chosen, or has been forced, to stay alive. After all, Primo Levi had already noted it in The Drowned and the Saved: the true witnesses are the submerged, not the escaped. And Bechis' cinema has always lived in that uncomfortable threshold.
Presented in competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival and in theaters from 17 September with Fandango, Return to Buenos Aires is the film in which the director returns to the Argentine dictatorship almost fifty years after his kidnapping. Not to tell it once again, but to move it into another body.
It is no coincidence that the production coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the coup of March 1976: the calendar, here, is already dramaturgy.
On 19 April 1977 Marco Bechis was kidnapped in Buenos Aires and locked up in the Club Atlético clandestine centre. After months of detention he is freed and expelled from Argentina, he lands in Italy, and from that wound an entire filmography is born: the almost western Alambrado, the claustrophobic Garage Olimpo, Figli/Hijos on the drama of children stolen from the disappeared, up to BirdWatchers - The land of red men.
In 2021 the same urgency has become a memoir with the exact title, The Solitude of the Subversive.
If Garage Olimpo, released in 1999, locked us inside the mechanism of disappearance, here the director carries out the opposite movement: look who came out of that mechanism alive and doesn't know what to do with his own survival.
So, when he states «Mariano is not me», the director does not distance himself: he makes the only gesture that allows him to get closer to the truth. He chose fiction, he explains, because sometimes it is the only way to reach a truth that memory alone cannot tell.
Being a survivor becomes an identity, and with it comes the guilt of being alive while others are not.
The urgency, however, is not archaeological. Bechis starts from today, from Gaza and Ukraine, from the conflicts that continue to produce an endless population of survivors. The journey that interests him is the one that goes from the survivor to the witness, and from the witness to a court capable of finally judging.
Argentina has undergone a long and tormented judicial journey which, after laws of impunity, amnesties and second thoughts, led to numerous convictions for the crimes of the dictatorship in the 2000s. Jorge Rafael Videla died in prison in 2013, while serving a life sentence. A collective memory which, Bechis assures, will survive even the present.
Buenos Aires, 2008. Mariano is an Italian doctor who, after thirty-three years spent in Italy, returns to Argentina to testify at the trial against the former soldiers who kidnapped, tortured and enslaved him during the dictatorship.
He is therefore a victim twice: of torture and of that hateful slavery which, in the eyes of the other survivors, almost risks making him suspect in turn.
Adriano Giannini, an actor often called upon to play physical roles, instead inhabits it with a completely internal sobriety which is the real coup de theater of the film. No emphasis, no ostentatious study of pain: the actor said that he had not prepared himself rationally, that he understood that reason didn't work there.
A month before filming, Bechis took him to his places of detention. And Giannini, instead of looking at the walls, ended up looking above all at the director's eyes while those eyes remembered.
“His eyes were my gateway to the character,” he said.
From that incandescent material, multiplied by a hundred, an instinctive and empathetic Mariano is born, never explained, whose only, enormous dramatic task is to hold on long enough to be able to give evidence.
A work of subtraction, perfectly in line with Bechis' method, which is never the same film after film: each film, claims the director, also contains the documentary of how it was made.
And a community of survivors moves around Giannini, not just a simple cast, which almost seems like living proof of that documentary.
The heart of Ritorno a Buenos Aires is the testimony.
An oral trial, in which nothing can be read, in which the truth must be pronounced orally in front of the torturers. And then the picana returns, the chains on the feet, the rape, the chilling figure of Doctor K, played by an unforgettable Adrián Fondari.
Above all, the most unspeakable guilt returns: that of having given in under torture, of having mentioned the names of his companions.
It is that "guilt of the survivor who persists" that Bechis talks about, the gray area that each witness brings with him and that no sentence can really alleviate.
The surprising thing is that the sobriety of the story never diminishes its power: it dampens it, if anything, to dig it deeper.
No main scene, no soundtrack that tells the viewer what to feel. Only silences, faces, the time of waiting, the places that still retain traces of what happened.
Yet we remain annihilated.
Because the director had the courage to enter into the wound, his own and that of others, without fear and without complacency, each time looking for the prototype and never the formula. And in a cinema that has often ended up questioning the executioners above all, here the gaze and voice of the survivors count first and foremost.
There is not the rhetoric of the victim, but the dizziness of someone who has to tell the unspeakable in a classroom, with measured words, while the past presses on.
If Giannini is the center of gravity, it is the women who give the film its most lyrical wound.
Verónica Gerez's character smells strangers in the bookshop where she works, because sometimes a customer brings with her the smell of her mother: a desaparecida murdered by the regime and thrown into the sea from a plane, in one of the terrifying flights of death.
It is the memory that passes from the body even before the mind, which Baudelaire entrusted to his Correspondances, where perfumes, colors and sounds respond to each other.
The gesture is minimal, almost imperceptible, and for this very reason devastating: it says, in a single breath, everything that the trials try to record, deposition after deposition.
Alongside her, Ana Celentano's Amalia embodies another generation, another Argentina, another way of having gone through the same History: two women, two ages of pain, which the film compares without hierarchies.
It is here that Ritorno a Buenos Aires finds one of its highest notes, because it chooses to tell not only what was done to the bodies, but what remains, decades later, in the lives of those who inhabited those bodies.
Return to Buenos Aires was not filmed in Buenos Aires.
Co-production between Fandango, 39Films, Karta Film and the Brazilian 34 Filmes, with Rai Cinema, the film was actually born elsewhere, between Turin and Porto Alegre.
In Turin, between January and February 2026, the camera even settled in the bunker room of the Vallette prison and in the streets of San Salvario, transforming the city into a Buenos Aires of the mind.
A detail which, far from being a footnote, rhymes with the fate of the protagonist: exile by necessity and not by choice.
The screenplay, together with Bechis, is by Vijaya Bechis Boll, who also stars in the film; the essential photography is by Fabrizio La Palombara, the editing by Jacopo Quadri and Nicolò Tettamanti, the original music by Guglielmo Diana.
Everything contributes to a direction that is admittedly poor in effects and full of anticipation.
And if the film recalls, almost en passant, that the same dictatorship organized the football World Cup in 1978 while the country disappeared into the basements of clandestine centers, it is to remind us how history knows how to disguise itself as a party.
