Kamchatka

Argentina in 1976, after the coup. A lawyer father and a teacher mother, whose names are on a list, take their children and hide in a house outside the city. Everything changes: names, school, friends. Their ten-year-old son tries to understand it as a game. Marcelo Pineyro directed. Ricardo Darin plays the father, Cecilia Roth the mother. The story stays entirely in the child's view. Adult conversations are half heard, nothing is explained, and the viewer knows exactly as much as he does. Kamchatka in the title is the most distant and most defensible territory in the board game he plays with his father; it is the single word his father says at the end, and the whole weight of the film is there. The disappeared of the period are never shown; the film keeps the violence not on screen but in its consequences. It was submitted as Argentina's Oscar entry that year. Who it is for: viewers who like stories of dictatorship and films built on a child's view. Who it is not for: anyone expecting explicitness; the film leaves much unsaid.