Argentina in the mid-1970s. An unprecedented wave of political violence is spreading throughout the country. An ordinary man gets into extraordinary circumstances and finds himself having to cover up a terrible crime.

Director’s note
With Rojo, I want to deal with the issue of silent majorities during traumatic historic times. During the 1970s in Argentina, initially under democratic rule and then a dictatorship, 30,000 people were killed by military or paramilitary groups. We have seen these traumatic events depicted several times, yet as of today we still hardly understand how they impacted the ordinary lives of ordinary people. We therefore fail, as a society, to acknowledge the necessary role of the silent majority during a genocide.
While researching the period of the 1970s, I discovered that many people found in that shaken context the opportunity to hide all sorts of “accidents” and bad deeds. The focus in Rojo is therefore on rather ordinary characters in exceptionally dark circumstances, who happen to find themselves mixed up in extraordinary events.

Argentina / Belgium / Brazil / Germany / France / Switzerland 2018
Director: Benjamín Naishtat
Production: Pucará Cine (Argentina), Sutor Kolonko (Germany), Desvia (Brazil), Ecce Films (France), Viking Film (The Netherlands)
World sales: tbc
German WCF partner: Sutor Kolonko (Germany)

Funded in the WCF Jury meeting in July 2016
Funding amount: 40,000 €