A film about Argentina’s history sheds light on its politics today

In the three weeks after it was released in cinemas last month, and before it started streaming on Amazon, almost 1m Argentines went to see “Argentina, 1985”, a film about the prosecutions of the generals and admirals who ran what was Latin America’s vilest dictatorship. It harks back to the events of that year in an Argentina of music cassettes, manual typewriters and many, many cigarettes. For much of the audience, it refers to unknown, or half-forgotten, history. In an unstrident way the film is a critique of the version of “historical memory” espoused by Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, the Peronist couple who between them have run Argentina for all but four of the past 20 years.