The Wandering Child: Resisting Invisibility in Marcos Carnevale’s Anita

• In Event: (In)visible Generation? Children in Contemporary Latin American Film

Abstract

The effects of the last military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 loom large in post dictatorial Argentine cinema, and Anita (Marcos Carnevale 2009) is no exception. The film revolves around a female protagonist – an ambivalently conceived young woman with a child-like presence – who wanders the streets of Buenos Aires as a result of the AMIA bombing – an attack targeted against Argentina’s most important Jewish community center in July 1994. Informed by cultural memory, this essay argues that although Anita is a fictionalised memory narrative of the AMIA bombing, the film revisits the search for the disappeared under the repressive governmental regime in Argentina from the child protagonist’s perspective. To further this argument two related issues are explored: the child’s wandering in search of her missing mother and her own status as one of the disappeared. While the child protagonist embarks on a journey that echoes the search undertaken by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo for their own missing offspring, her brother searches for her. Facing adversity, displacement and exclusion, the child embodies the memory of the victims of both atrocities and their resistance to invisibility. Furthermore, mindful of the image of the AMIA bombing as a solely Jewish problem, the essay aims to demonstrate that by strategically revisiting the plight of Argentine society of the 70s and 80s through the eyes of an innocent child, the film makes the AMIA bombing a national experience and ultimately a constitutive part of the nation’s cultural memory.

Author

• Mirna Vohnsen, University College Dublin