Falling

Eva van Roekel

Falling confronts the uneasy spaces between memory, violence and moral responsibility in post-dictatorship Argentina. The film follows an anthropologist as she documents a former paratrooper implicated in the 1970s dictatorship's genocide, a man complicit in torture, disappearances and killings. Neither hero nor villain, he inhabits a shadowy zone of withdrawal from his crimes, obsessively revisiting skydiving videos, old paratrooper photos and memories of jump sites. As the anthropologist films, ethical tensions surface, raising questions about how to engage a perpetrator without condoning him and how to navigate polarized histories and moral "others" without imposing one's own perspective. The film becomes a critical meditation on the limits of empathy, the weight of memory and the possibilities and perils of witnessing. Blending essayistic observation, archival material and intimate collaboration, Falling immerses viewers in the gray zones of human complicity, asking a provocative question: can understanding a violent past from a perpetrator perspective help bring it, and those who lived it, to a reflective close?

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