Filmmaker Agustina Comedi delves into her father Jaime’s past. The reconstruction of his intimate life as a father, undress a clandestine past; not only that of a political activist, but also that of a gay man. Before getting married to Agustina’s mother, Jaime had been in a relationship with another man for more than 10 years. In catholic Argentina of the ’80s, Jaime’s true nature was a family secret.
Silence is a Falling Body is narrated through Jaime’s home videos, which portray a typical medium class family during the boom of neoliberalism in Argentina. This story of political activism and sexual dissidence offers a fascinating insight into life in Argentina between the 1970s and 1990s, peeling back layers of left-wing politics, homosexuality, and AIDS as it shifts between private and public spheres, intertwining the personal and the political. The testimonies of his friends, all of them lesbians, gays, and transexuals, talk about the multiple forms of violence the LGTB community went threw during the last military dictatorship in Argentina, but also about the parties and the emotional alliances that built a new way of resistance. In this exercise of not only individual, but political and collective memory, the film questions the meaning of desire and freedom.