As the person responsible for a situation of family violence tense to the point that it might only end in tragedy; thus the director Damián Galateo chooses to portray in Terror familiar to his grandfather Alberto, an Argentine soccer star from the 1930s who ended up murdered by one of his sons, to prevent him from killing his mother.
This docufiction that premieres today at Bafici, and that can also be seen on April 25 and 29, has the particularity of incorporating elements of horror cinema into a story that seeks both to raise awareness regarding gender violence and to show that it is possible build healthy family ties, even for those with violent ancestors.
«In the cinema, terror is always something that comes from outside; while in real life the real terror is a violent father, an abuser. The world is full of terror and you don’t have to go far to find it, because the monster itself is ourselves,” says Damián Galateo, 42, who is also a screenwriter and producer.
The son of Italian immigrants, Alberto Luis Galateo (1912-1961) was a professional soccer player who played between 1935 and 1939 for Huracán, Chacarita and Racing, but perhaps the highest point of his career was his participation in the 1934 World Cup, where he scored a goal once morest Sweden.
But this “monster” on the court was also a “monster” in another sense, a man who routinely came home drunk and severely beat his wife and three children. The one who got the worst of it was his wife, Fortunata “Tuna” Bongionvanni, who caused her to lose her left eye. In times of dictatorship when there was no divorce and women were confined to the domestic space and “don’t get involved” reigned, the way out of this trap came from the least expected place: with three shots, the eldest son, then of 21 years old, he ended the life of his 49-year-old father.
“When I was 12 years old, my grandmother died. A few days later, they told me the story of my grandfather,” says Damián Galateo, son of Luis Alberto, the youngest of the children of “El Flaco,” the scorer who died at the hands of his firstborn, at the beginning of his film. Yiyi». Since then, “I can’t stop thinking regarding what happened that Sunday in 1961,” says the filmmaker in another section of the film.
One of the things that “obsesses” the director is imagining “what it would have been like for them to face that situation of family violence in such a closed world, and to hate that person who gave you life so much. It is that with my parents, brothers, nephews we have a very different family, and really getting together on Sundays with them is something expected. I would have chosen them, if I had had the chance », he reflects.
In fact, the film intersperses at various points the historical story with a current one, of laughter, complicity and quality of shared time; Damián Galateo’s father, mother and siblings agreed to give their testimony on camera, but also the other daughter of “El Flaco” Galateo -aunt Susana, for the director-, as well as his cousins and nephews. “Yiyi”, however, refused to participate for reasonable reasons, and died last year, in the process of making the film.
However, the director explains that he did not Terror familiar with a “therapeutic” or “self-help” purpose that some have attributed to him, nor is he recognized as “brave”, as some attribute to him, for his decision to make this tragedy a film. “I do it out of fear, because it is very difficult for me to face the idea of death, of violence and that is why I try to put fiction, color, sound into it to make it more bearable,” he clarifies.
«My film also seeks to break with the idea that violent families come from violent families. It is not true or, at least, it is not my case and this assumption seems unfair to me, because on top of the fact that you are a victim of the situation, it seems that you will inevitably be a victim in the future as well. The film also confronts the contrasting ways in which his family “before” -grandparents and uncles- and “the one now” -siblings, cousins and nephews- relate to family history, the former resorting to silence and concealment and the new generations betting “to take everything out”, as Galateo expresses.
In fact, his 11 and 19-year-old nephews -both great-grandchildren of Alberto Luis Galateo- appear in the film, referring to the event. “I would like good things to happen to them, not like in the past. I want the family to have happy moments, not so sad… And that no member has to do anything to another”, says Santiago, the first of them, with admirable clarity.
«The film is not only the story of my family and its redemption, but an attempt to understand a society that for a long time instilled the values of the strongest, of sexist violence and the exaltation of personal glory above all else. Personally, I feel the need to investigate the family past so that it does not happen, as the Greeks said, that an aberrant crime generates a lineage of suffering without cause, which extends for several generations, condemning them to repetition. And on the other hand, it moves me to challenge a society that, through its devices of power, places women in the place of objects”, says the director.
In the film, all this is said by appealing to the visual, musical and editing resources typical of horror films, something that is rarely combined with documentary cinema. “This is key, because I wanted it to be a film that is not only understood intellectually, but that produces a physical reaction, that feels in the body what I suppose that family must have felt. And, of all the genres, the most physical is terror», closes Galateo.
Telam
