Figlia mia. Vita di Franca Jarach, desaparecida

When she was kidnapped on 25 June 1976, 18-year-old Franca Jarach was perhaps the best former student of the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, the most prestigious school in the Argentine capital. She lived a happy life with her parents Vera and Giorgio, Italian Jews who had fled overseas after the racial laws. She is a brilliant girl, the only child of a cultured family, part of a cosmopolitan community. She writes poetry, plays music, paints and is involved in politics. She has started working as a graphic designer and wants to become a teacher. But being involved in politics in Latin America during the Plan Cóndor, where opposition is crushed by the physical elimination of dissidents, can mean signing your own death warrant. All it takes is a book, a song, someone whispering your name under torture. Franca becomes one of the 30,000 desaparecidos of those years: all trace of her is lost. Only after seven years of searching and false leads, blackmailing phone calls and appeals, do her parents learn the first fragment of the truth. But it is only in the new millennium that her mother manages to piece together all the pieces and discover what happened to Franca. Carlo Greppi meticulously reconstructs her short vida through photographs, documents, letters and interviews. And then there is Vera: a courageous mother capable of turning her search for truth into a collective struggle. Memory, truth and justice were what the Madres de Plaza de Mayo had been demanding since 1977. And that is what finally happened, thanks in part to the tenacity of Vera, one of the last of them still alive.