Rojo is set in Argentina just before the right wing military coup that took place in 1976.
A man arrives in a restaurant and starts to attack and insult Claudio, a respected lawyer and the main character of the film. The altercation continues later in the evening. From that moment on Claudio will be dragged into a nightmare. And then a Chilean inspector arrives to investigate…
The film capably explores one the darkest pages in Argentina’s history.
Director Benjamin Naishtat spoke to Socialist Review about his new film Rojo and Argentina in the 1970s and now.
What inspired you to make this film now?
I wanted to make a film about the 1970s, but frankly there were already many films about those years and about the “desaparecidos” [disappeared], the torture and the political activism against all of this. I discovered, however, that there were not films about the silent majority of Argentinians that went through these times either without doing any political activity at all or being accomplices of the regime.
