“The ambiguity of the present moment is also real; the people who speak in the film do so from 2001, amid the complexity and uncertainty of that time. It’s that beautiful boundary where a documentary can be ambiguous, can generate more questions, can make a historical event more complex—against the idea that a documentary should provide answers and certainties about what happened.”
In December you avoid any voice-over or external explanation. Why was it important for the story to be sustained exclusively through images from the time, without contemporary mediation?
The voice-over automatically makes me ask: who is speaking to me, and why? It would pull me into the present too quickly; I trust in the time-travel experience. The present already has the present. I also find the lack of information interesting for the audience: trying to open doors, not close them. The ambiguity of the present moment is real as well; the people who speak in the film do so from 2001, within the complexity and uncertainty of that moment. It’s that beautiful boundary where a documentary can be ambiguous, can generate more questions, can add layers to a historical event—against the idea that a documentary should provide answers and certainties about what happened.
The film avoids nostalgia and aims for an immersive, almost real-time experience. How did you work on the rhythm and narrative structure so that the audience could feel the acceleration of events?
In parallel—or I don’t remember which came first, the idea or the research—I discovered that on December 1st the so-called corralito was announced. That is, on Saturday (it was Saturday), December 1st, an Economy Minister announced a restriction on people’s access to the money in their bank accounts. And on January 2nd, 2002, Duhalde assumed the presidency after a series of resignations and appointments. My memory of it was a bit blurrier; I didn’t recall that something so momentous was also so precisely contained within a single month, historiographically speaking. Obviously there is a before and an after, but limits are good—they add depth. You need certain boundaries for your research to become specific, to become concrete. And within those limits I always knew that, one way or another, the film—the acceleration, the extraordinary nature of what happened, the narrative—would emerge. It was a matter of articulating the scenes and the moments in an interesting, visually stimulating, and chronological way. Reality is an accumulation of constant accidents. The decision—the limits—of using only period material, that boundary, is a decision, a choice, that also brings a great deal of freedom.
December poses an ethical dilemma: showing the rawness of the archival material without softening it, yet avoiding the exploitation of pain. How did you find that balance while editing such sensitive footage?
I couldn’t say for certain. I’d think that one conducts an experiment and shares it at a given moment; there is nothing in the film that I couldn’t watch, nothing that would anger me to see.
From 1982 to December, your work seems to build a kind of “audiovisual memory” based on television archives. What draws you to this type of material, and what challenges do you encounter when turning it into contemporary cinema?
I like using television; I’m from a generation in which television was important. I use it in a parasitic way and try to transform it; at times it works. Television had very good professional camera operators—probably still does. Now almost everyone has a camera in their pocket; it wasn’t always like that.
The project went through financing complications, with the withdrawal of INCAA’s support and a reconfiguration of the co-production with Uruguay. How did this affect the creative process and the final edit of the film?
I don’t think there were deep changes in the creative process itself due to the lack of INCAA funding; it was, however, a hard blow to the film’s production. We changed some strategies and made it work; we managed to finish it, which is what matters. Any fund, large or small, changes a film like December enormously—productions of that scale are heavily affected. The original idea was always to edit with Fernando Epstein in Uruguay; that didn’t change.
In more than one sense, the film dialogues with the present. What parallels between 2001 and today did you find most unsettling while working with this material?
Many and none. At times reality and the edit blurred together for me; there were moments when I stopped watching current news. At other times, I think the film gradually became a portrait; I increasingly feel it that way—a very characteristic portrait of an era, not the portrait, but a portrait of that period. And as a portrait, it belongs very much to its time. I see it as very different now. It’s 25 years ago—it seems like little, and it’s also a lot.
Jueves 5 y 19 de febrero / 20hs
ARTHAUS / Bartolomé Mitre 434. CABA
Director: Abbas Fahdel / 2025
Selecciones: Locarno 2025 (Ganadora Mejor Dirección) – DocLisboa – Tallinn Black Nights – Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival – Viennale – El Gouna Film Festival – Seminici
