El Eternauta’s Wife is not a documentary about Héctor German Oesterheld’s famous comic, Argentina’s sad story of repression, or the victims of the extermination… El Eternauta’s Wife is a story that aims to delve into Elsa Oesterheld, the woman. Mother of four girls. Wife. Tireless worker. A woman who had a family that one day was forcibly removed from her. A woman who lost all that she loved in the world.
The disappearance and death of her four daughters is one of the cruelest cases in Argentina’s recent history. There are many audiovisual feature-length stories about Elsa’s famous husband, but hardly any discuss Elsa’s life as a woman, mother, grandmother, and fighter.
My aim with this project is to show everyone the sensitivity and the tenacity of this woman; a normal woman who by a quirk of destiny has become a key figure in Argentina’s recent history.
Elsa is an untiring fighter who, above all, wants to keep the memory of her family alive and to prevent the passage of time and history from erasing it from the heart of a whole country. Elsa always says that if she hadn’t recovered her grandson, she wouldn’t have been able to go on living. Her grandson gave her a reason to continue with her life, to build another family…
This is Elsa Sánchez’s story. The story of a woman who came from Galicia inside her mother’s womb, escaping poverty like many other Spanish immigrants. And whose destiny was to become one of the symbols of a country’s fight for freedom and, consequently, of the whole world’s.
I think everyone should know this horrifying story that is also full of hope for a better life. I am overwhelmed by the unpretentiousness of a person who, 40 years on, continued to fight with the same courage and determination.
At the time the film was shot, Elsa worked with the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, the civil rights group that tries to locate those that went missing during the dictatorship, especially the babies, something she experienced personally since she was able to recover her two grandsons, (Marina’s son Martín, Diana’s son Fernando).
