Benjamin Ávila, the director of the Argentine film Infancia clandestina, said that he hadn’t aimed to make an autobiographical film about the period of the military dictatorship, but confessed that he had put a lot of his own personal experience into his first feature film.

“The idea we have of the Argentine dictatorship is associated with death and panic, and of course there was a lot of that, but there were also people living everyday lives, and love, humour, families and schooldays, and I wanted to avoid preconceptions and provide other elements for building up memories.” This isn’t the first time that Ávila has dealt with this subject as he has already won several international awards for the documentary Nietos, identidad y memoria, that he made with the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and this experience had helped him when it came to faithfully reconstructing this period.