gavin6942 After the end of the Dirty War, a high school teacher sets out to find out who the mother of her adopted daughter is.Like many progressive actors and others in the country, the lead actress in the film, Norma Aleandro, was forced into exile. She traveled to Uruguay first and Spain later. She returned after the fall of the military government in 1983. Aleandro once said, "Alicia's personal search is also my nation's search for the truth about our history. The film is positive in the way it demonstrates that she can change her life despite all she is losing." Argentina's history is a dark one. It may not get the coverage of Nicaragua, El Salvador or Chile, but it had some of the same problems of unrest in the 20th century. In fact, few places in Central and South America seemed to have it easy, with dictators sprouting up all over. Some of them, sad to say, were put there and / or backed by the United States, something we as a nation have still not properly atoned for.Whether by choice or not, director Luis Puenzo has remained largely an Argentine filmmaker. He did make an American film (or at least a film with American actors) in 1989, "Old Gringo", but then went back to Argentina. One wonders what the difference is that makes some directors go international and others go into relative obscurity outside their home countries.

hikerhetav Well, I usually don't see much of the foreign language films but after viewing Oscars giving a special award to such great films, I almost got swept off at viewing few films. This one too was one of them where a viewer can't get delight in each scene after scene. But there might be impacts ringing to-and-fro after finishing the whole. The story is quite engaging related to societal issues waving around Argentinian people and their disappeared families. How would one react on losing someone close is what depicted unwaveringly. This was the movie which made me cry at certain scenes. Some dialogs even made me numb. The power of this film lies in placing ourselves into the place of characters of the film. It derives the feelings inside us for how would we react when we are placed into situation of losing a very important thing of our life. Undoubtedly, this movie is the one which shows human emotions on some very realistic aspects of life. This film has also played some beautiful strokes in the field of analyzing history of Argentina. And that is what makes the film to watch with top determination.

markdukesports First off, let me get this through that this movie is not a bad movie. The acting is fantastic and I could really tell the pain that the characters were going through during the movie. I also like the premise and how realistic the problems were. However, for me there were two big problems that kind of ruined the movie for me. The first one is not that big but the second one really bugged me.The first problem is how confusing the plot was to me. Maybe it's because the movie is in Spanish and I had to rely on the subtitles but I had trouble catching on to the plot. For me the movie sequence was like: Gabby is adopted-I wonder who her parents really are- I think I found her grandmother- Her parents may be political prisoners- No wait, they might not be her parents after all. This is just a summary, but I dislike how the movie constantly nullifies its progress. The second problem for me was how the entire movie was built up for us to find out who Gabby's parents are, but we never find out. That bothered me because I had spent two hours trying to figure out the plot and hang on to every word to find the answer, but it's never given. That just left me feeling empty.Overall, this movie has a lot of great moments but what it doesn't give really takes away from the overall movie.

Irving Gamboa Although it seems that the film "La Historia Oficial" was an attempt to mock the contemporary style of its cinematic American competition, I believe that stylistically the film is not American; however, its melodramatic content is purely American. I despise melodramas mainly for one reason: melodramatic films tend to "use" highly polemical historical, sociological, cultural or geographic issues as a mean to intensify their weak content. Thereafter, a sudden, supposedly intense, "problem" arises; such problem is usually a romantic microcosm of the main source (what I referred to as the polemical source), which it drains and diminishes. American examples of this travesty are: Casablanca, Titanic, and All that heaven allows.Stylistically La Historia Oficial is a very Latin film: the lighting is very similar to that of "El callejón de los Milagros", while the cinematography is not as preoccupied with constant flamboyant takes, and the editing is not as conventionally "fluid" as that of American melodramas. The opening of the film is a metaphorical depiction of the entire story: A deceiving shot that simulates emptiness and isolation (the mental, spiritual and political state in which the Argentineans found themselves at that period of time). But as the film zooms out of focus we are surprised to see that below the camera focus, hundreds of students stand waiting to recite their National Anthem. The use of longs shots reminds me more of European than American films.Thematically the film's focus is to represent the turmoil and corruption that Argentina suffered during the "Dirty War". The main family is used as the melodramatic microcosm to represent an entire culture… an entire Nation, but this trick worked subtler than it does in the majority of melodramas. For this reason I enjoyed the film: because the duality represented by the two social structures (those above and those below) was interestingly analogous to the dichotomy of female and male, wife and husband, good and evil. The anarchistic undertones of the film interested me: while Alicia represented the rigid, formal and intellectual part of society, her blindness to truth is almost unbelievable because of her faith in facts. Slowly she begins to reject the corrupted ideals she once saw as truth and realizes that there is another greater truth: the reality that occurs yet is ripped from the history book, for history is usually written by the Assassins. Her rejection of social institutions (education, religion, and family) convinced her that conventional society is a blind organism. On the other hand, her husband, Roberto was concerned with elevating in the social ladder regardless of consequences, which is a way of attempting to do "good" by disregarding evil. Because of Roberto's blind and cruel conviction, Alicia realized that all of history is fiction, and for once she understands and experiences the truth.Although the representation of the greater truth through this family was well done, the ending was the most hindering point of the film because nothing was resolved. This sad reality of such interesting film contradicts Fernando Birri's idea of what Latin American Cinema should be: "…This is the revolutionary function of social documentary and realist, critical and popular cinema in Latin America. By testifying, critically, to this reality – to this sub-reality, this misery – cinema refuses it. It rejects it. It denounces, judges, criticizes and deconstructs it. Because it shows matters as they irrefutably are, and not as we would like them to be…". This sad terrible truth applies to Luis Peunzo's interpretation of that sub-reality and misery in which his country crumbled. Incredible flashes of an ultimate truth appeared in his cinematic vision… but the viewers were simply teased, like a young boy hypnotized by a glorious belly-dancer, who at the climactic moment decides to retreat from her art. "La Historia Oficial" depicts a great truth, yet it veils it in order to appeal to a greater audience. The film lies in order to win the warmth of acceptance and to receive trivial applauses. Even though it is clear that the Nation was left in chaotic turmoil and irreparable hopelessness, the "systematic and conventional" cinematic format the film had to apply to, forced the filmmaker to end in a happy/inscrutable manner… it is obvious that if the film ended in a tragic form its wouldn't have been accepted as well by the American audience, whom the film was targeting after all.