This isn't the first time that actor Ricardo Darín has helped shine a light into one of the dingiest rooms in Argentina's history: the military dictatorship that staged a right-wing coup d'etat and ruled his country between 1976 and 1983, during which as many as 30,000 people may have been murdered and disappeared.
He did it before, playing a former criminal investigator in director Juan José Campanella's "The Secret in Their Eyes" (2009), which won the Oscar for foreign film. In "Kamchatka" (2002) he portrayed a research scientist hiding out with his family from the military police. And in "Kóblik" (2016) he starred as a former Navy pilot who becomes a marked man after disobeying an order to take part in so-called "death flights," in which purported enemies of the junta were stripped, drugged and thrown out of airplanes and helicopters.
But he's added a new twist in "Argentina, 1985," which premiered Friday on Amazon Prime Video and is Argentina's Oscar entry for international film. It's the first time he's played a real person from that bleak era, Julio César Strassera, a revered figure who's rightly regarded as a defender of Latin American democracy. An Argentine lawyer, Strassera served as chief federal prosecutor in the 1985 trial of the military leaders responsible for massive human rights crimes.
