New narratives in the Argentine documentary films of the recent years about the Malvinas War. Documentary, fiction and detective comedy in Telma, the cinema and the soldier of Brenda Taubin (2022)

Abstract

The Malvinas War of 1982 between the Argentine Republic and the United Kingdom was an event that left marks in the collective memory of the Argentine society. Unlike Argentine cinema about the Malvinas focused on the stories of former combatants, in recent years have emerged documentary films whose narratives are focused on the voices of civilians who experienced the war from the continent. This films also represented the memories about the war from other perspectives. In this work I will analyze the film Telma, the cinema and the soldier (2022) by Brenda Taubin, where the construction of the heroic character is centered on Telma, a 75-year-old woman who, together with her fellow retirees from a film club, decides to undertake the search of a young unknown soldier, who during the Malvinas war wrote letters with his teenage daughter. The film, which establishes intersections between different cinematographic genres and works with archival material from the war, proposes not only to address the forms of memory and imagination about the war in the present, but also to think of contemporary cinema as a space and device that conveys different modes of affection in the community.