/ 17 January 2011

Reaching for the future

Reaching For The Future

“If you keep going over the past, you’re going to end up with a thousand pasts and no future,” says an aged Ricardo Morales, whose beautiful wife was raped and murdered many years before in the politically turbulent Argentina of the 1970s.

Benjamin Esposito, a retired federal agent who worked on the case, listens intently to Ricardo but is not reassured by his words.

This scene comes from the Argentinian thriller, The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), that won an Oscar for best foreign-language movie (and is still showing in South African cinemas). The interchange between Morales and Esposito touches on two intertwined themes that the film as a whole explores — memory and justice.

The need evident in all societies to solve what history has left unsettled is embodied by the main character, Esposito, played by Argentinian cinema veteran Ricardo Darín.

Although it is 25 years since the murder of Morales’s wife, Esposito embarks on his own quixotic quest for historical justice. This quest touches on fundamental questions about the often painful relevance of the past to the present — and in doing so resonates powerfully with the enduring presence of past injustices in both Argentinian and South African contemporary realities.

The film puts a spotlight on the difficulties of living with and wanting to rectify past wrongdoings. For countries like Argentina and South Africa, which felt the heavy hand of repressive regimes and which are still dealing with their legacies, the past is a conundrum. It lurks unresolved in the memory of individuals and the collective.

Dealing with the past
From truth commissions to punitive trials, nothing seems capable of settling such issues from the past. Former Argentinian president Jorge Videla is a case in point.

Recently he received a life sentence for crimes against humanity during his military rule in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although the life span of the colonel is likely to be short (he is 85 years old), human rights activists and others celebrated the landmark court ruling.

In the same way that Esposito in The Secret in Their Eyes finds it hard to reach closure in his murder case, the Videla saga is an example of one society’s ceaseless struggles to come to terms with the dark moments in its history. When Videla relinquished power in 1981 and democracy returned to Argentina, the dictator was sentenced to a life term in jail — but a controversial presidential pardon in the 1990s gave him and other military figures freedom.

In recent years, though, Argentina has seen strong condemnation of human rights violations that took place during Videla’s so-called “Dirty War” era, characterised by states of emergency and other repressive security measures. The new trials, apart from repunishing past crimes, have also delegitimised official attempts to bypass historical memory.

In similar ways South Africa’s apartheid past is far from resolved. It mingles with the present on a daily basis. More than a decade after Desmond Tutu handed down the five volumes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report to then-president Nelson Mandela, people still debate the relevance of this process.

According to the report, the overall aim of the TRC was to promote “national unity and reconciliation in a spirit of understanding which transcends the conflicts and divisions of the past”. Yet as efforts to overcome the legacies of apartheid continue, they are coupled with constant reminders of justice unfulfilled.

The assassination last year of Eugene Terre’Blanche, whether it was purely criminal (if such a thing exists) or racially motivated, can be read as an act of vengeance. In the same way xenophobia is a symptom of a wrongly directed dissatisfaction with where the country is going now from where it was supposed to 16 years ago.

Crime cannot be properly understood without the backdrop of apartheid and the desire for some form of compensation that goes beyond the generally figurative recognition that the TRC provided.

The past is the perfect culprit for all the problems of the present, and rightly so. But how long is long enough to continue falling back on it? This is the key question that resonates throughout The Secret in Their Eyes. The movie asks whether societies are irrevocably tied to their past.

Can it be that if we understand ourselves only as products of history, we negate the possibility of new futures? Is it possible that memory limits our capacity to move forward and, in our pursuit of historical justice, we lose ourselves?

In addition to all this, the movie’s skilful direction, audacious cinematography and persuasive acting make this Latin American gem a must-see.

Jazmin Acuña, a citizen of Paraguay, is a short-term intern at the Mail & Guardian who will shortly graduate with her BA in international relations from Connecticut College in the US