La Flaca Alejandra: Post-dictatorship Documentary and (No) Reconciliation in Chile

This article focuses on the place of post-dictatorship documentary cinema within Chile's process of transitional justice and, in doing so, gives preference to an agonistic understanding of political reconciliation over restorative notions. Chile is a nation where the process of political reconciliation after the 17-year-long dictatorship has been inherently entangled with an official prescriptive, restorative notion of national reconciliation, highly reliant on perpetrators' impunity and vigorously rejected by survivors and their supporters. Post-dictatorship documentary cinema has largely uncovered and depicted the dictatorial state's crimes, while offering testimonial space to survivors. Some films have interrogated the perspectives of the Pinochet supporter, the collaborator, and the perpetrator while wrestling with an open dialectics of confrontational and reconciliatory gestures. One such film is Carmen Castillo and Guy Girard's La Flaca Alejandra ([Skinny Alexandra], 1994), which narrates the reconciliatory re-encounter of Carmen Castillo and Marcia Merino, former friends, revolutionary militants, and survivors, who went on to become, respectively, an exiled writer and a collaborator of the secret service. Structured as a reflexive first-person documentary of returnas the meditation of an exiled survivor who travels back to the scene of trauma in ChileLa Flaca Alejandra orchestrates an agonistic drama of unresolved gestures of confrontation and reconciliation.