The Blonds (Los Rubios)

An inventive film, The Blonds follows young Argentinean filmmaker Albertina Carri on a trip through Buenos Aires as she attempts to unravel the disappearance and death of her politically leftist parents during the brutal 1970s military junta of Argentina's “dirty war” when Carri was four years old. Drawing on a variety of cinematic techniques to explore the nature of identity and memory, the film is part documentary, part memoir, and part fiction, interweaving documentary interviews, photographic montages, dramatic scenes, and low-budget animation. While Carri's complex narrative and experimental visual techniques tend to detract from the emotional gravity of her film, the intentional confusion nevertheless underscores the film's central themes of make-believe and mystery in the frustrating journey to discern fact from fiction in attempting to recreate lives from whispers and rumors. Carri's older siblings, who remember her mother and father, will not talk with her, while the neighbors seem more concerned with exonerating themselves than helping Carri learn more about her parents (who are described by one of the interviewees as "blond") or the officials (and all, strangely enough, have a difficult time recalling anything prior to 1983). An interesting meditation on the "fiction of memory," this is recommended. Aud: C, P. (A. Cantú)