The Official Story (1985) on Netflix
Buenos Aires, 1983. Alicia Marnet de Ibáñez teaches history and lives with her husband Roberto and their adopted five-year-old daughter, Gaby. She begins asking who Gaby's mother was.
- Netflix3.6/5
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- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Argentina is in the last months of its military dictatorship. In Buenos Aires, Alicia Marnet de Ibáñez teaches history at a high school; her husband, Roberto, is a lawyer. The two are raising five-year-old Gaby, whom they adopted. Alicia's students and a fellow teacher, Benítez, dispute what the official history books say about the country, and a friend, Ana, comes home from exile in Europe. Alicia asks about Gaby's birth and why the family marks the day she arrived rather than the day she was born. Roberto tells her the adoption was normal and that she should leave the matter alone.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Official Story (1985)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Luis Puenzo, fearing for his safety, planned to shoot The Official Story in secret with hidden 16mm cameras, but Argentina's military junta fell at about the time the screenplay was finished.
- The Official Story won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 58th Academy Awards, the first time a Latin American film took the prize.
- The film draws on Argentina's Dirty War, which began after Jorge Rafael Videla's junta took power in 1976: Congress was suspended, unions and political parties were banned, and between 9,000 and 30,000 people deemed left-wing subversives disappeared.
- The film was shot entirely in Buenos Aires, including the Plaza de Mayo, where the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo gathered in the late 1970s with pictures of the disappeared; the Mothers still protest there every Thursday at 3:30 pm.
