ARGENTINA: Iluminados por el fuego (Enlightened by the Fire). 2005

Director: Tristán Bauer
Stars: César Albarracín, José Luis Alfonzo, Arturo Bonín, Hugo Carrizo, Julio Chávez.
Release date: Argentina - 5 Sept 2005
Length: 100 mins

The film, directed and co-written by Tristán Bauer (Después de la tormenta / After the Storm) and starring the excellent Gastón Pauls (Nueve reinas / Nine Queens), is based on a book by Edgardo Esteban, who was one of the underarmed and underfed conscripts sent to fight the much better equipped British army in the inhospitable archipelago. "When you are 18, you don't think about death," says Esteban, currently a TV journalist. "But ever since this war, death has been with us constantly. Two things help me close this chapter - the book and now the movie."

Synopsis
Iluminados por el fuego narrates the memories of 40-year-old Esteban Leguizamón, who went to fight in the Falklands in 1982 at the age of only 18. An ex-companion?s suicide throws him back into the memories of a war in which he fought with another two young recruits: Vargas, the one who committed suicide, and Juan, killed in combat. There he finds not only the horrors of the war and suffering from the cold, but also tales of friendship and comradeship. Esteban?s thoughts convey the slow and gradual descent of their fragile lives into the claws of death itself. 20 years after the war, Esteban decides to return to the Islands to face his past and close old wounds.

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