When Brynne Miller first stepped foot in Argentina, she found a story worth sharing. Miller, a 2010 Elon alumna of Elon University's first interactive media graduate class, used her experience abroad to inspire her film “Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and The Search for Identity," which was shown Tuesday. The film received an Indy from the Indy Film Festival for an award of excellence, identifying the film as one of the top 18 films internationally.
The film illustrates the period of military dictatorship in Argentina, known as The Dirty War, during which time approximately 10,000 people disappeared after being supposedly abducted by the new regime. Currently, grandmothers (las abuelas) march in La Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina to fight for their right to reunite with their abducted grandchildren.
Miller, the director of Creative Productions and one of the producers of the movie, began filming in 2009 when she traveled to Argentina with her family. Her father is a Fulbright scholar and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He traveled to Argentina in 2002 and encountered Argentinean broadcasting students producing stories on The Dirty War.
[quote]The story just spoke to us as a college-age person to find out that your whole life has been a lie.[/quote]
When Miller and family arrived in Argentina, Miller said they decided to do a few short stories as well, but when they came back to the states, they realized they had too much to tell for a few short news pieces.
“We just fell in love with this story and so we decided to write a documentary,” she said. “I had always loved longform storytelling, so this story allowed me to do that and we got to work on it as a family.”
Miller said the goal of the film is education. After traveling to Argentina, the dictatorial years became a topic her whole family became very educated about, but it was not something they knew much about before traveling to Argentina.
The story especially interested her and her sister because they are close in age to many of the people currently discovering that they were abducted when they were younger, she said.
“This story just so spoke to us as a college-age person to find out that your whole life has been a lie,” Miller said. “The film is about how it feels to find out that not only are your parents not your real parents, but that they also had something to do with the murder of your real parents.”
The story is told mainly through the eyes of Miller and her sister, making the documentary even more special to her, she said. It shows the importance of young people understanding and fighting for human rights and being in tune with world events and how they affect people, she said.
“We interviewed five of the (abducted) grandchildren,” Miller said. “It’s supposed to be their story. It’s basically the story about human identity.”
Of the 500 children that were supposedly abducted, 105 have been found, with the last being discovered in August of last year.
The world premiere of the documentary was Jan. 17 at UNC-Chapel Hill, Miller’s undergraduate alma mater where 425 people were in attendance.
She said they are using colleges and universities as their main platform for sharing this story.
“We have 90 screenings across the country planned for this semester,” Miller said. “We have been amazed and floored by colleges and universities we have contacted or some that have even contacted us.”
Miller and her family attend as many of the showings as they can and stay afterward for a question and answer session as they did for Elon’s showing. For those they cannot attend, they Skype so that they are still able to answer questions and share more about the story.
But Miller said the most rewarding thing has just been being able to share this story with so many others.
“That’s something cool in itself that we have been able to work on something we care about and to share something with (people) that they might not have heard about,” she said.