EXCLUSIVE: Argentina recently got a $20 billion economic bailout package, courtesy of President Trump. But it’s not the first time the country has faced financial crisis.
In December 2001, civil unrest and rioting broke out in Buenos Aires and other cities, the culmination of public anger over what has been called the “Argentine great depression.” That time of political and social turmoil is explored in the documentary December (Diciembre), which makes its world premiere on Monday in International Competition at IDFA (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam).
Boutique sales agency Compañía de Cine, based in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, has acquired international sales rights for the documentary directed by Lucas Gallo. We have your first look at the film in the trailer below.
‘December’
Compañía de Cine
“This brilliantly edited documentary is composed entirely of archival footage shot between December 1, 2001 and January 3, 2002,” writes the IDFA program, “five weeks in which the country had five different presidents, and a growing crisis exploded. In the first week political reports were still interspersed with seemingly random news items—a film star photo-shoot, concert rehearsals, multiple car accidents—but soon the focus shifted entirely to the protests, riots and political twists and turns.”
Protestors rallied under the slogan, “They all must go!” (¡Que se vayan todos!).
Director Lucas Gallo
Compañía de Cine
“From the outset, my intention with December was to liberate images and sounds from the structures that confined them,” Gallo writes in a director’s statement. “Television is not immediacy but an edited discourse — a narrative shaped by power and interest. Once stripped of that logic, images recover their vitality, their plasticity, their beauty. I was not interested in illustrating history, but in restoring to these fragments their original potency — their capacity to affect us, to vibrate in the present.”
Gallo continues, referring to the current administration of right-wing President Javier Milei, “History repeats itself with an irony that borders on the absurd: today’s government openly venerates the same economic policies that precipitated the collapse of 2001, while adopting as its campaign slogan “they all must go” — the cry that, in December of that year [2001], was hurled precisely against that political class. Such a paradox exposes the fragility of collective memory, and the urgency of returning to it. We inhabit a society increasingly willing to renounce its capacity for critical thought. Polarization simplifies, divides, anesthetizes. To know history is not an act of nostalgia; it is an act of resistance against repetition.
“December does not aspire to recount 2001 with the false clarity of hindsight. It does not seek to explain, but to traverse. I am not reconstructing the past — I am summoning it. Freed from their informative function, the images re-emerge as living fragments, porous and unsettled, charged with new meanings. How does that past reverberate in us today? What echoes endure? The political lies not in the verdict, but in the renewed possibility of seeing.”
Watch the trailer for December below.
