Human rights film battles for release

There were boos and catcalls, cries of “shame” and “disgrace,” inappropriate laughter and occasional walkouts. The Sept. 2 screening of “Imagining Argentina” at the Venice Film Festival wasn’t the kind of near riot that has made Milan’s La Scala Opera House notorious, but it was certainly shocking in its own right.

Because of that reaction, the movie’s Oscar-winning star, in partnership with a major international human rights organization, has embarked on a public relations offensive to save a production whose distribution has already been affected by that uproarious Venice reaction.

“There was a lot of anger at the film” at the festival, said Emma Thompson, who co-stars in the movie with Antonio Banderas.

“It took us all by surprise,” she said, speaking recently by phone from London. “I felt the reaction was somewhat hysterical, and there was a great deal of personalized venom.”

“Argentina’s” writer-director, Christopher Hampton (“Dangerous Liaisons”), said, “The film is very challenging, and certain people did take exception to the premise, which is mixing a real and very unpleasant political situation and a sort of magical realist style.”

Based on Lawrence Thornton’s critically acclaimed 1988 novel, “Imagining Argentina” takes place during the “dirty war” of the late 1970s, when an Argentine military dictatorship kidnapped and murdered nearly 30,000 alleged leftists. The film stars Thompson as a journalist who is repeatedly raped and tortured by soldiers of the regime and co-stars Banderas as her husband, a children’s theater director who begins to have psychic visions involving the future fates of the disappeared. He soon begins holding regular seance-like meetings at which relatives of the desaparecidos show up to try out find out what will happen to their loved ones.

Shot in Buenos Aires with the cooperation of the Argentine government, Hampton’s movie, which he has been trying to film since 1989, veers from searing scenes of torture and rape (a particularly brutal one involves Thompson’s character) to almost lyrical sequences in which the low-key, highly spiritual Banderas communes with his believers.

But this juxtaposition of the brutal and the magical seems to have created the furor over the picture.

“Unconvincing and superficial,” Variety said in its review from the festival. And at a press conference the day after the screening, at least two journalists said “Imagining Argentina” was a disaster, one of the worst films screened in Venice’s 60-year history.

“The necessity humans have to mythologize dreadful parts of their history is one of the only ways we come to terms to things,” Thompson said in response to this criticism. “Yet for some people, you can’t combine reality and metaphor in this way.”

But a strange thing happened the day after the press screening. At a public showing, the film received a six-minute standing ovation.

“It was a wonderfully emotional screening, and Emma was incredibly emotional,” said Kirk D’Amico of Los Angeles-based Myriad Pictures, which holds the foreign sales rights to the picture.

“If the audience had reacted the same way as the press, I would have had to say we made a terrible mistake here,” Thompson said. “But there was clearly a battle to be fought.”

Enter Amnesty International. Winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, the organization was interested in “Imagining Argentina” because of its human rights angle and offered research help for the production; statistics provided by Amnesty International about the number of “disappeared” in other countries around the world appear at the end of the film.

Bonnie Abaunza, Amnesty International’s director of artist relations, saw the film in May and felt “this was a movie we could really back.” Then, when Abaunza heard about the Venice press reaction, she set up a meeting with Santiago Pozo, head of L.A.-based Arenas Entertainment, which co-financed “Imagining Argentina” with Universal Pictures. After Abaunza offered Amnesty International’s support for the picture, the organization embarked on a worldwide screening campaign involving its branches in Spain, Mexico, Germany and more than a dozen other countries.

Amnesty International has arranged to show the picture to internationally known human rights activists, including Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman (“Death and the Maiden”) and Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, who heads an investigation into crimes against Spaniards by the Argentine and Chilean military dictatorships of the 1970s. The organization has also helped set up a U.N. screening scheduled for March in New York.

“This is the first time we’re doing something like this, and I realize there could be a backlash,” Abaunza said. “But this is an important movie, and this is the work we do.”

Arenas Entertainment’s Pozo noted that Amnesty International “can be helpful in terms of reaching the core audience for this film. I also think they are going to be very important in saying this film reflects the reality of what’s happened in Argentina, and that is important for us because some of the journalists in Venice dismissed the picture because they didn’t feel it was an accurate portrayal.”

Pozo, a Spaniard, said he wanted to make the film because, other than the 1985 Argentine movie “The Official Story,” an Oscar winner for best foreign language Film, few movies have been made about the repressive Latin American political situation of the 1970s and 1980s. “What happened in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, El Salvador is something that hasn’t been told,” he said. “And that’s why we put this picture into production, to tell that story.”

Pozo and Hampton also said that at least some of the criticism of the film has come from right-wing Argentine journalists who don’t want the real story to come out and who helped create the disturbance at the Venice screening.

“Imagining Argentina” has already opened in Italy, where it flopped. The picture is scheduled for release in Spain next month and will open in the U.S. in March or April. Although Arenas and Universal co-financed the picture, Arenas will distribute the film in this country, with Universal handling it in South America and some other areas.

But the road ahead will undoubtedly be rocky. Kirk D’Amico of Myriad, which owns the distribution rights in most foreign countries, said he has yet to sell to major players like France, Germany and Japan “because of the negative response in Venice.”

Thompson feels that because of the movie’s difficult subject matter, “we can’t go through the normal commercial routes. I think what we’ll have to do is open it very selectively in conjunction with human rights organizations. It would never have been a runaway hit, because it’s a difficult subject.”

Added Hampton: “I’m glad there’s a bit of a breather, where we can all regroup and think about how to approach the release of this film.”