It is 1978 and Sofia Borri is two years old when she last sees her mother, kidnapped by the Argentine military police and never returned. Together with her, 30,000 other men and women “disappeared” in Argentina at the hands of the military dictatorship, which fell at the end of October 1983.
Figlie is the story of Silvia, Sofia’s mother, an architect and militant, desaparecida. But it is also the story of Sofia and the life she built in Italy, where she arrived with her father, after an initial period in Sweden, through a political asylum programme. And it is, albeit in a small way, the story of Sara, who has known the pain of losing her mother since she was seventeen.
In Figlie Sara Poma and Sofia Borri take us through the fractures and cracks of personal and collective histories. They do this by rediscovering the precious little material that remains — a few photos, diary pages — and interweaving it with fragments of the audiovisual archives, but above all by giving voice to those who did not have the chance to tell, in a journey where the search for memory is transformed into a workshop of care and democracy.
“The construction of memory is of the people,” we hear from the voice of one of Silvia’s friends interviewed. “Memory is a process in constant motion”. Figlie teaches us that the stories of private memoirs are a real space for the politics of relationships and the active transformation of history, where the right to speak and the time of listening is the only antidote to the gaps in documents, to the subtraction of evidence, to the chasms of power where truth sinks in, names are erased, lives are lost.
Figlie is a series by Chora Media for Rai Play Sound written and narrated by Sara Poma together with Sofia Borri.
Resonances of memory is part of the festival section “Focus Argentina / Forty years after the fall of the military dictatorship”.
Biblioteca Amilcar Cabral – Libraries and Cultural Welfare Sector of the Municipality of Bologna was founded in 1974 with the aim of developing knowledge of international problems and in particular of the life of countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Oceania. Over time, the areas of interest have broadened to cover other topics, such as migration, minorities, international issues, colonialism, international cooperation, human rights, slavery and trafficking, racism, racialisation, globalisation, environment and climate crisis, literature and travel narratives.