A builder of images.

• Author: Agosin, Marjorie
• Position: Filmmaker Juan Mandelbaum - Includes filmography - Interview

Argentine filmmaker Juan Mandelbaum has portrayed the lives of Latin Americans in documentaries memorable for their sensitivity and empathic vision. He allows his protagonists' stories to unfold as they speak with extraordinary candor about their lives, seeming to forget the camera. These are film with room for feelings.

It would seem that Mandelbaum's career has been carefully developed from his first U.S.-released film in 1978, Facades, to his film about two Weimarera photographers, Ringl and Pit, in 1995. His documentaries stem from two parallel traditions in Latin America. The first is film that documents a collective experience as part of a historical process. The second, film that relates the unofficial accounts of those who make history on the sidelines. The latter is the case of In Women's Hands (1991; coproduced with Rachel Field), which portrays Chilean women's participation in public life over a twenty-year period beginning in 1969.

This striking film, which was part of the nationally broadcast Americas television series, rouses viewers' solidarity for the characters through penetrating scenes and images: mothers of the disappeared who hang on to the photo of their missing son or daughter as the most precious possession, or two former political prisoners who slowly walk us through the middle-class neighborhood where they were held clandestinely and recount their torture with profound composure.

"Hearing again how young people dreamed of a better world in the sixties was very moving," Mandelbaum recalls, "and then to visit the torture sites where they were detained and listen to their accounts of terror was very difficult."

Exhibiting a delicate lyricism, In Women's Hands is pervaded with ambiguity, enabling the viewer to contemplate more fully how official history and everyday unofficial history intertwine and juxtapose. In fact, a theme connecting many of the director's films is the essential humanity of individuals who have been displaced by historical circumstances beyond their control but who, over the course of their lives, have prevailed.

"Sometimes there are a lot of images and moments that I get in my head before I start filming Mandelbaum says. "These images come out of what I've researched and learned about a topic or a person. When I'm shooting and I'm able to record one of those moments I imagined or a person relates a powerful story just the way I wanted to hear it and I see it in the final cut of the film, I get excited and I realize I am doing what I most love to do. At the same time, I start every day on a shoot with a mix of intense desire and anxiety. The adventure of discovery is what I love about the documentary."

For In Women's Hands, the director saw to every detail -- the music, familiar sounds of certain streets and...