Alita Cine

In the Argentinian prison where he's serving a sentence, Marcos cherishes his smartphone, which he uses to keep in touch with family and loved ones. It's also the device with which, at the request of filmmaker Toia Bonino, he documents his daily life. His video recordings and back-and-forth voice messages with Bonino form a precious link to the outside world.

After the death of her grandfather, Antonio Bonino, Toia found six negatives proving that he was a member of the Fascist Party and an aide to Benito Mussolini. Influenced by this discovery, the director sets out to trace her male family lineage, whom the end of World War II brought to Argentina. Instead of a clarification, however, the past crumbles and disintegrates into a mosaic of archival material, family films, excerpts from personal diaries and fragments of the works of Roberto Rossellini or Luchino Visconti. But it is the meanings that emerge from the combination of disparate images that offer answers and fill the information vacuum that has shaped generations of the family. The dynamics of the Bonino family's male-female relationships have a much darker basis than the social context of the time. In the story of grandfather, father, cousins and sons, Toia also finds a story of identity and of the role of wives, mothers, grandmothers and daughters in a history shaped by men.