Cinema
Señores generales, señores coroneles
Alfonso Gumucio · 1976
Synopsis
The film looks back at the military coup of 1971, which overthrew President Juan José Torres and brought Hugo Banzer to power, and at the part played in it jointly by the Bolivian army and the American intelligence agency. It assembles archives and interviews, among them those of the former American intelligence agent Philip Agee and the French journalist Régis Debray. Its title, in the form of an apostrophe, addresses the officers themselves, generals and colonels, who then hold the country.
Context
It is its author's first film, made when he was living in Paris, where he had gone into exile in 1972, and the work rests on archive montage and on speech. Philip Agee, a former American intelligence officer, testifies in it about the agency's activities. Six years later, its author would publish a general history of Bolivian films. After the 1980 coup, its author feared he would have to leave the film in Bolivia, unable to get it out.
Who it is for
In Spanish, with no French version. A militant montage that assumes knowing who Banzer and Torres were, and what American intelligence services were then accused of.
Prizes and reception
The first film signed by an author who later became the historian of Bolivian cinema, honoured in 2024 by the Cinemateca Boliviana.
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