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Film short abstract

An anthropologist films a former Argentinian paratrooper convicted for genocide. Gradually, the film project becomes a reckoning with its own impossibility: the tension of depicting the banality of evil without normalizing it. Can she navigate the polarized histories and complete this vexed film?

Film synopsis

Falling confronts the spaces between memory, violence and moral responsibility in post-dictatorship Argentina. The film follows an anthropologist as she documents a military paratrooper implicated in the genocide during the 1970s dictatorship, a man complicit in torture, enforced disappearances and killings. Neither hero nor villain, he inhabits a shadowy zone of withdrawal from his crimes, obsessively revisiting skydiving videos, paratrooper photographs and memories of jump sites. As the anthropologist films, ethical tensions surface. How to engage a perpetrator without condoning him? How to navigate polarized histories and moral “others” without imposing one’s own perspective? As it unfolds, the project turns into a reckoning with its own impossibility, exposing the inescapable tension between depicting the banality of evil and resisting its normalization. A tension deeply resonant today. Midway through, the film shifts into a meditation on the dilemmas of empathy, the weight of memory and the im/possibilities of representing atrocity. At times when authoritarian ideologies are once again gaining ground globally, Falling highlights the chilling familiarity of the mechanisms of justification and hypocrisy that enable violence to persist. Blending essayistic observation, archival material and footage of uneasy collaboration, Falling immerses viewers in the gray zones of complicity and moral ambiguity. It asks whether engaging violent pasts from a perpetrator’s perspective can help bring that past toward new forms of reflective exchange. The film ends by resounding the difficult necessity of temporarily setting aside one’s moral judgments, of allowing oneself to ‘fall’, in order to better understand, without excusing or justifying harm.