The omnibus film “18-J” does not get us any closer to the truth of what happened in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, when a massive blast killed 85 people in a Jewish community center.
Although we might wish otherwise, that is not the purpose of this admirable if not entirely successful movie, which consists of 10 short works by Argentine filmmakers commemorating a coal-black mark in their country’s recent history.
Most of the artists choose to explore emotional repercussions rather than trade in cold facts. The majority, likewise, prefer carefully shaped fictional stories to the serrated edges of oral history or investigative journalism.
The best pieces in “18-J” serve as memorials to the dead while tenderly caressing the scars of loss and grief borne by the living. The least effective works come off as slick, contrived exercises in storytelling.
“18-J” screens in the Berkeley and Mountain View legs of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and is co-presented by the Anti-Defamation League, Central Pacific Region and the Latino Film Festival.
An early high point is Daniel Burman’s diamond-cut sliver of contemporary life in the streets near the catastrophe. Through elegant compositions and snippets of interviews, we discern the attack’s lingering ripples.
The Jewish director, best known in this country for his 2004 feature “Lost Embrace,” employs careful restraint all the way to his gut-punching finale — a boy’s muted birthday celebration, shadowed every year because it also marks the day his father was killed.
Lucia Cedron’s impeccably acted narrative, about an older couple preparing to visit their daughter and grandson in Israel, also has a twist at the end. The husband and wife worry continually about their kin because, you know, Israel is dangerous. Buenos Aires, by comparison, is supposed to be safe for Jews.
Mauricio Wainrot’s contribution is a beautifully staged and performed modern dance piece. But its meaning is somewhat abstract, which makes it frustrating in this context where so many of the pieces are oblique, ephemeral evocations of loss.
Consequently, actress Susa Pecoraro’s monologue, filmed by Alejandro Doria, is refreshing for mixing unwavering directness with its poetry. It’s the only segment sharpened with anger, and willing to claim the moral authority to make assertions of a bungled investigation, tacit government cooperation in the bombing and a cover-up.
Come to think of it, it’s amazing that in the entire lineup there’s no collar-grabbing handheld video, no mash-up of news footage from July 18, no gritty bid to shock us from complacency. To the contrary, every last piece is overly stylized and deliberately paced.
Some of the techniques, and the emotional response they provoke, will seem familiar from the coverage of the victims of the 9/11 tragedy. There are similarities in every terrorist attack, namely the deaths of ordinary people and the gaping voids where profound relationships existed.
A few of the shorts in “18-J” allude to the random and arbitrary nature of bombs. Not in placement or target, which in this case was unmistakable, but in the sense that people occasionally die because they are in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time.
Some viewers will see some of the pieces in “18-J” as generic reactions to any terrorist attack. However, the explicitly Jewish references in other works place the entire film in a specific context.
That said, some of the filmmakers are more successful than others at making us feel connected as Jews to the Buenos Aires community that suffered this horrific outrage. That may ultimately be this film’s lasting legacy.
“18-J” screens at 2 p.m. Monday, July 31 at the Century in Mountain View and 2 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 1 at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley.