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Film short abstract

An anthropologist films a former Argentinian paratrooper implicated in the dictatorship’s genocide. Will she be able to navigate polarized moral positions and bring this vexed film to a close?

Film synopsis

Falling moves along the fault lines of memory, violence and moral responsibility in post-dictatorship Argentina. An anthropologist follows former paratrooper Pepe involved in the genocidal violence of the 1970s military regime, now serving a life sentence. A man who resists easy categorization: neither a clear-cut perpetrator nor a figure of remorse. He withdraws into a world of jumps, photographs and memories, where the past continues to repeat itself without the violence ever being fully confronted. As the camera observes, a tension emerges. How do you engage with someone who committed genocide but does not acknowledge it, without granting absolution? And how do you position yourself in relation to historical violence that continues to reverberate? Blending observation, archival material and a fraught collaboration with Pepe and his brother, Falling explores what it means to look, to listen and to record. The film reflects on empathy, memory and the burden of the past, asking whether understanding can help bring something to a close or instead opens up new, troubling questions.