Time Suspended

The ambivalent nature of memory, loss, and political struggle

The memory of Laura Bonaparte fades with every moment that passes in the nursing home where she lives in Mexico, the country where she found refuge during a turbulent past. After losing three of her children to the Argentine dictatorship, she began an arduous life as a human rights activist, which led her to bring the regime's military chiefs to trial. Now, in the autumn of her life, after her struggle to keep alive the memory of the disappeared, it is oblivion that gains space in her own being.

Laura Bonaparte was one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the movement formed during the 1970s by women whose children and family members had been disappeared by the military dictatorship. Her granddaughter, director Natalia Bruschtein, investigates the layers of that life through photographs, manuscripts, and interviews in which Bonaparte recounts in precise detail what happened to her children and other missing relatives.

Time Suspended takes care to unite, through careful editing, the fragments of a passionate life in which detachment and commitment to a just cause were equally devastating forces. Memory is drawn here as an ambivalent organ: an opportunity to give life to what cannot be touched, and at the same time a force that, once lost, erases the discomfort that drowns us. Bruschtein, who is principally known as an editor, brings those multiple filmic sources together with clarity and emotional precision.

The film is Bruschtein's first feature as director, produced by the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica and FOPROCINE in Mexico. It went on to win numerous international awards, including prizes at the Budapest International Documentary Film Festival, the Chicago International Film Festival, and the Festival of the Memory, among many others, and screened at IDFA and festivals across Latin America, Europe, and beyond.