The Call

Buenos Aires, 1976: anti-dictatorship militant Silvia Labayru is kidnapped by paramilitary soldiers and taken to a clandestine detention centre. She is twenty years old, and five months pregnant. There she is tortured, gives birth on a table, performs slave labour, is repeatedly abused by an officer and forced to play a part in a military operation that results in the disappearance of five people. Over two years later, she is freed and goes into exile in Madrid, thinking that the hell is over. Yet she is fiercely condemned by her fellow Argentines as a collaborator, insistently faced with the question: what did you do to survive?

Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero spent two years interviewing Labayru and her family, friends, children, lovers, and ex-militants. Accounts conflict, memories falter, interviews veer from seemingly stray details to the most profound experiences of terror and suffering, and Guerriero weaves it all into an astonishingly multi-faceted, complex portrait of Labayru. This is a story of the very limit points of human experience, of violence, captivity and struggle; but, as we learn of how Labayru rebuilt her life, eventually returning to Argentina and to a partner from her activist days, it also becomes a story of love, reconciliation and survival in the face of extremity.