La dignidad de los nadies (2005) User Reviews

Chaotic and grainy, but for some of us, essential viewing

[Chris Knipp · 8/10 · 16 April 2006]

This tumultuous and boldly-titled documentary, La Dignidad de los nadies, focuses on the poor and dispossessed of Argentina and their recent increasingly successful battles against neo-liberalism and globalization, as well as the continuing severe problems with repossessed farms, enormous poverty, widespread joblessness, and a socialized health care system in chaos. Fernando Solanas, a man of the revolutionary Sixties, sprang to fame in his early thirties with his 1968 documentary trilogy La Hora de los Hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces, and other bright spots in his career include Los Hijos de Fierro/The sons of Fierro (1975), Tangos: El Exilio de Gardel/Tangos: Gardel's Exile (1985), Sur/South (1988), El Viaje/The Voyage (1992), and Memoria del Saqueo/A Social Genocide (2004), recipient of the Golden Bear at Berlin.

The Dignity of the Nobodies is part of a larger picture, beginning with the forced resignation of President de la Rúa followed by a succession of several other failed presidents, the default on the international debut, the detaching of the Argentine peso from the dollar, and the subsequent "sacking" or robbery of the nation that took place in 2002 when banks shut down, local debts were absorbed into the national dept in what might be called an outright explosion of corruption in democracy after the country got rid of its military dictatorship. This is the sequence of events described in Solanas' Memoria del Saqueo (Social Genocide is the English title but obviously the title more accurately rendered is "Memoir of a Sacking"). The Dignity of the Nobodies is hence described as "the second chapter in a series of four documentaries exposing the corporate sacking of Argentina" and said to be focused "on the victims and their struggle to fight back." The projected two sequels are to be called Argentina Latente/Latent Argentina and La Tierra Sublevada/The Roused Land.

The Dignity of the Nobodies, which ranges all over Argentina as far as Patagonia to tell its story, is presented as a series of specific portraits, or sketches of situations as seen through the experiences of individuals. Toba, for example is a teacher who runs a free food kitchen, and saved the life of Martin, a delivery man who was shot by police at a 2001 police riot against the mothers of Plaza de Mayo. Antonia and Chipi are two others who feed two hundred people at a soup kitchen. Margarita and Colinche are a homeless and jobless couple with nine children who do odd jobs from a horse drawn cart; Colinche's dream is for her children to go to school; and in the sequels presented at the film's end, they are going to school. The "picket camp" is a huge gathering of jobless who live in solidarity and block roads to make their plight known: these scenes resemble the US in the Depression era. Lucy is a farm widow who has led a fight of other farm wives to prevent auctioning off of farms in an ongoing series of group disruption actions during which they sing the national anthem at auctions and shut them down.

Darío is a charismatic young martyr of the poor people's struggle -- he looked rather like Che Guevara in his prime -- who died in another police riot when trying to save a friend. Darío's death and the protests of his girlfriend, Claudia, and a host of supporters led to the unmasking of the killers and their imprisonment. The penultimate story is of Gustavo, a young priest of Greater Buenos Aires who's so outspoken against police "maffias" (their spelling) and their collusion with local mayors with ties to the previous dictatorship that he is driven out of his church and subsequently gives up the priesthood to be a full-time activist. Again the people were able to find justice in a case of police murders. The last segment is about the Patagonian Zanon ceramics factory. Several thousand factories were shut down as a result of the economic collapse of the country. Workers have seized and reopened about 160 and the Zanon factory is one that has been restored to productivity and sells to the local market. Keeping such factories open is an ongoing struggle against authorities, as is the struggle to prevent farms from being repossessed, despite the success of Lucy's group. The film ends with a freeze-frame on the young pretty face of a girl student, because students now donate time to help out at the hospitals.

Solanas is a profound chronicler and polemicist, but the chaotic nature of his material perhaps robs him of the possibility of being an artist. One longs at times for some Olympian voice, some kind of explanation by a provocative muckraker like Michael Moore or lucid diagrams like those in The Corporation, or the detailed personal intimacy of a story like Benjamin Kahn's in his documentary of searching out the identity of his father, the great architect Louis Kahn, in My Architect, or the almost clinical and yet sweet and human poetry too of a microscopic study like the one of schoolchildren in the French To Be and To Have, or the searching analysis and commitment of a biographical study like Herzog's Grizzly Man. Solanas can't provide any of these qualities. What he can provide in abundance is essential raw information and a rich human document. His movie may lead some of us to go and find out more about what has been happening in Argentina over the past decade. Despite the chaotic and unwieldy material, the editor Juan Carlos Macias bravely molds things into a coherent flow -- even if one inevitably knows this is only part of a larger picture requiring the kind of analysis provided in the preceding Solanas film, Social Genocide. Highly recommended for anyone interested in political documentary and essential viewing for students of contemporary Latin America. For all its graininess, great stuff; and about as humanistic and social-consciousness-raising as documentary film-making can get.

Shocking, Unbelievable social chaos in a "once" first world country!

[gonz30 · 10/10 · 25 October 2005]

As rich as an Argentine, they used to say.

Even in the 1970s, Argentina and particularly the Buenos Aires area covered in this documentary had a middle class, the life style and affluence that was not just the envy of the Americas, but that of Spain, Italy, and Portugal, among other now "rich" countries.

In the history of mass European migration to "America", Argentina was often on par with the USA as the most desired destination, and back then going to "America" also meant going to Argentina. Well, how low can the former 2nd or 3rd richest nation in the world fall? See this documentary, and find out.

Even if you've visited Argentina six times since early 2002 as I have, you'll be floored. The few shantytowns a tourist may see resemble poor Mississippi towns in the US more than the huge and really miserable Brazilian or South African shantytowns. So, one gets the impression that the poorest in Buenos Aires live like the lower middle class in third world countries.

But Argentine reality is different, as shown in this film. These newly poor Argentines have come from what was one one of the most socially equal countries in the world, with a very big middle class. These newly poor have not lived in these slums for decades like in South Africa, or even a century in Brazil's case.

This is perhaps why the film's title refers to dignity, something these "nouveau" poor have not lost. Perhaps one of the few things European multinationals, in cohorts with the local government, have not been able to rob them of.

The feeling of community and helping each other out in adversity is beautifully expressed in this documentary. It's unbelievable that in a naturally rich, huge country, but with a population comparable to metropolitan Tokyo alone, people go hungry.

More importantly than being the world's 6th largest country, is the fact that it is prime land with more than everything it needs. It has no huge deserts like in Australia & China, not mostly ice & tundra like Canada or Russia, nor large & mostly tropical forest like Brazil.

It's self sufficient in everything, exporting oil & natural gas, shares the world's largest fresh water reserve - once the world's breadbasket & greatest meat exporter. This documentary helps one to understand the absurdity of the current situation.

If possible, see the director's earlier "Memorias del Saqueo" (2004)first. YES, you may think the people are responsible for electing corrupt politicians. But what "HONEST" European & American bankers unload loans on a nation, knowing a good part of the money will be kept by corrupt politicians.... in many cases the banks & corporations had already bribed government officials to obtain their lucrative contracts & licenses to take away the country's richness from its people and transfer them abroad. As one wise lady in the film yells as banks take away her family's lands, "Argentina is no longer Argentina." Nowhere else have I seen this point better expressed.

That issue is actually addressed more fully in "Memorias del Saqueo", but anyway, more than a decade of these "saqueos" (pillages) have produced the miserable results shown in both films. And again, this is not India with a billion people & endemic poverty for centuries. This is (WAS) a nearly fully developed country THE SIZE OF India, but with 3.8% of India's population, and all the natural reserves India, China, Japan don't have! Not only things like natural gas and oil, but a 3 thousand kilometer coast whose fishing rights have been sold to a great extent to the Japanese, leaving Argentine fisherman unemployed.

All this is what happens when a well intentioned pretty well developed & industrialized country follows the policy of the World Bank, IMF, and current rules of modern capitalism to the T. "Foreign investors" offer a country this supposedly honest carrot. The "good faith" of the international banking system is unmasked by this director as you've never seen it done before on the screen.

You'll see how foreign concerns take everything (including Argentine oil, sold off at a laughable price to the Spanish "Repsol") from the people as a whole, and from the formerly middle-class people: the riches of the whole country; all this achieved by bribing over half of the Congress.

The rich have not been dispossessed by the way, as in communist or popular revolutions, but rather a rape of a country unseen in modern times has occurred.

Entire villages have been closed down by these multinationals, if the factories are deemed not profitable, causing human suffering the film's characters will realistically recount.

Rich Italian (from Italy itself) pensioners who invested their pension plans in Argentina & have been up in arms for 3 years, asking for every Euro of profit their pensions promised should see this film. They can confirm what their devious Pension Plans did to a whole people. Didn't these "investors" wonder why the yield was so fabulous?

In fact, Italian-descending farmers represent one of the most poignant cases shown in this documentary. And one that the middle and upper classes, the audiences who WATCH this kind of "artsy festival" film can relate to. It's the case of grandchildren of Italian and other European immigrants - they themselves now in their 60s, whose forefathers labored for generations in this land to acquire their own farms.

Now, they are having to turn them over to foreign banks or go to auction and sell them at ridiculous prices by foreigners, who else?, or banks to "settle debts". A significant slice of the film shows this injustice.

Don't miss this documentary, and do all you can to see the earlier "Memorias del Saqueo." This is the second of two gems that expose a reality the "First World" should see, right in their faces.