The Blonds
(Los Rubios)
Screening on Film
With Albertina Carri, Santiago Giralt, Jesica Suarez.
Argentina/US, 2003, 35mm, 89 min.
Spanish with English subtitles.
Print source: Diego Schipani
Carri achieved a radical breakthrough with Los Rubios, her edgy and still-controversial shape-shifting meditation on memory, truth and the untold history of the desaparacidos. Inspired by her own angry searching through shards of personal and collective memory for the facts of her own parents’ still unsolved assassination, Carri weaves together seemingly distinct approaches and emotions into a stubbornly ungainly yet potent admixture, melding raw video interviews and wistful domestic scenes improbably reenacted with Playmobil figurines while, at each turn, pointing to the limitations of each method to represent or uncover the ever-elusive truth. In one of her film’s boldest gambits, Carri casts an actress to play herself, with the director and her surrogate often appearing together uncannily on screen. One of the few prominent and successful films about the desaparacidos made by one of its victims, Los Rubios is a film whose radical hybridity and formal restlessness seem to echo the personal and collective trauma known all too well by its creator.