Concurrent Films with The Disappeared

Peter Sanders

Special Event with Peter Sanders, the director of the documentary film The Disappeared
Friday, September 11, 2009
Introduction to the film by Peter Sanders, Director of The Disappeared, with questions and answers following the movie .
Cinema Novo at UTEP Union Cinema 
6 pm followed by the film at 7 pm
$1 UTEP students, faculty, and staff, $2 others

Peter Sanders received a B.A. in History from the University of Vermont (1992) and graduated in 1994 from the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting in New York. In 2003 Mr. Sanders began reporting stories as a free-lance journalist in New York, and that year began working as a reporter for NBC affiliates in Helena, Montana, and Shreveport, Louisiana. In 2006, he earned his master’s degree in broadcast journalism at New York University. His thirty-minute version of The Disappeared received an award from the New York Chapter of the national Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 2005. Mr. Sanders was visiting Buenos Aires in 2003 when the news broke that Horacio Pietragalla, one of 500 children who disappeared during the dictatorship, was reunited with his biological family. Since then, he has returned numerous times to Buenos Aires and amassed what may be the most extensive and ground-breaking collection of interviews on this highly publicized and debated period in Argentina’s public history. This is his first feature-length documentary film.
Peter Sander's visit is sponsored in part by UTEP's Department of History.

The Disappeared

Friday and Satudrday, September 11 and 12, 2009
Cinema Novo at UTEP Union Cinema
7 pm
$1 UTEP students, faculty, and staff, $2 others

Peter Sanders’s documentary distills the brutality of Argentina’s “Dirty War” in the experience of one survivor. Horacio Pietragalla, his parents murdered by the military, is raised by the maid of the officer who kidnapped him and comes to symbolize the deep dislocation that still pervades Argentinian society. The film follows Horacio’s journey to reclaim his identity and reconstruct the cause for which his real parents died. His story internalizes the tragedy that ravaged Argentina for seven years and exposes still polarized views on state-driven terrorism through groundbreaking interviews with top military officials, concentration camp victims, human rights activists, journalists, and members of Horacio’s surrogate and biological families. This documentary represents the first time a filmmaker has followed a child of the disappeared in his journey of discovery. Spanning a period of five years, the film documents the only case in which a person was able to recover the remains of both murdered parents, and records the first-ever interviews with top military officers of the “Dirty War.”

Written and directed by Peter Sanders 
Spanish with English subtitles 
Rated PG-13 
2007
This film is a Cinema Novo Film Society event