La noche de los lápices

I have seen this movie only twice, and the last time was at least ten years ago, but the memory has stayed with me. As my country becomes more repressed and dictatorial, this film has come back to haunt me.

The events start out very simply but under a paranoid regime, quickly escalate to a point that must have been unimaginable even to those living in Argentina at that time. When I first saw it, my heart ached for those children and their families caught up in a situation that was hard for me to imagine; now it seems closer than I could ever have dreamed.

The very simplicity of this film and its straightforward telling of the story of these bright and idealistic teenagers is all the more powerful for its lack of embellishment. There is no need to beat up the story and its hand-held cameras and lack of sophisticated lighting or makeup has the effect of breaking through the fourth wall and making us participants in the unfolding drama. We can't get away but neither can we help, and our powerlessness reflects that of the children and their families.

It should be mandatory viewing for all those who think "it can't happen here".

To Deny our past, sometimes means to be ashamed of it. In Marychase's words, I can find only a feeling like this. As in my home country, Italy, in these years a lot of people try to deny the atrocities of Mussolini's dictatorship, I can see that in Argentina there are people that don't trust the slaughters committed by their military government during the seventies. This movie is poetic, sad, tragic but, I think, is very close to the truth. It's a movie, of course, with a plot, screenplay,...in a movie you can't necessarily see the whole story of a class of students. But what you see in it is something strong, hard and...unbelievable. And that's for some people don't want to believe it. Don't want to accept it. But it was true, sadly... And another shame regarding this movie is that's very hard to find it on DVD!!!

Argentina is remembering the Nigh of the Pencils today, so I watched this movie. To a foreign person, this may only be the name of this movie or a catastrophe, but for any Argentinian, it's part of our soul, a part that we all are ashamed and we try day after day to prevent to happened again.

Argentina has a slogan for this event "Nunca mas" (Nevermore), and this movie reflects this event and most importantly, the environment this actions were taken and how did they suffer.

This movie is strong and cold, but show's the real experience of this event with a very smart cast, 7/10 but I will add +1 for being national.

This movie is not for the faint hearted, but it's the most realistic one I have ever seen about the brutality of a military dictatorship. But what I like most is the description of the friendship of college students who, despite emprisonmente and tortures, keep their dignity and their desire to struggle jointly for a better world. A movie which should be watched by every apathic teenager - the shock may really make him/her mature his/her views and attitudes.

I have always known of the existence of this film, but avoided it through many years due to the heartbreaking intense scenes I knew it contained. This year we are remembering in Argentina the thirtieth anniversary of the terrible dictatorship, so the film was shown at my high school and I could see it for the first time. There are not enough words to express how I felt; imagining I could have been one of the victims if I had lived thirty years ago. I am definitely against this dictatorship, and I admire all the kidnapped and disappeared guys' mothers, who continue struggling to find their sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters. But besides this, I think the interesting side of the film is that despite our political positions (as I'd previously said, mine is against this dictatorship) we can be sure that everything that's happened to these students is TERRIBLE. Terrible because they were standing up for their ideas, they were asking for a decrease in the students' bus ticket price. Whatever our political position is, we cannot deny the fact that everyone has their right to be judged as a human being. The very talented actors let us see, feel and listen how badly, unfairly and terribly those students were taken away from their homes and relatives; tortured to insanity, rapped and killed with no mercy on 1976. I recommend this film to everyone who would like to know what happened. The film only shows one episode of the whole horrible dictatorship. There were about 30.000 disappeared people between those years, not only students but also Jewish people, artists, politicians, journalists... and many more. La Noche De Los Lápices retells one of the -if not the most- horrible and terrible episode during the dictatorship. As an Argentinean I can tell you all that this film touched my heart and made me cry so hard I could hardly watch it through the tears at times. In spite of the pain the film may provoke, it is a "must" for all those people who ever had a dream, an ideal, a wish. Knowing, by listening to my parents, by reading books and by watching this film, the atrocities occurred that night and every night and every day during the dictatorship make my heart jump and my vocal chords shout as loud as I can: "NEVERMORE". Thank you for reading.