Lamb of God

The traumas of the past awaken the present’s difficulties of reconciliation in this dramatic and politically acute synthesis of a story, about one family’s confrontation with internal betrayal. When Guillermina’s grandfather is abducted by criminals and the ransom is difficult to raise, she persuades her mother Teresa to leave her French exile and return to Buenos Aires to help. But Teresa is still bleeding from never-healed wounds.
To accentuate the tender points of contact between past and present, the Argentinean director Lucía Cedrón elegantly moves between her home country of 1978 and of 2002. In 1978 all the world’s eyes were upon Argentina as the organiser of the football World Cup, something that made its military dictatorship clamp down even harder on any subversive currents. Guillermina’s parents were actively resisting the regime and the little girl’s innocent gaze on her parents is heavily emphasised in the exactingly recreated flashbacks – which always start out with a gliding and stylish editing technique.
Lamb of God shares some features with the Brazilian The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, which also connected football to a lack of democracy. But football is much less foregrounded in Lamb of God, which rather focuses on the complicated conflicts to which Teresa’s return to her home country leads. Reconciliation must take a powerful confrontation with betrayal and disloyalty, while the importance of fighting for freedom – and against fascism – dominates the flashbacks to the turbulent 1970s.
The Argentinean nation’s historical trauma is also actually this divided family’s trauma. But will one crisis be enough to reunite the family?