Cautiva (Captive)

Set in 1994 Buenos Aires, writer/director/producer Gaston Biraben's feature debut puts its protagonist, the 15-year-old Cristina Quadri (Barbara Lombardo), smack dab in the middle of an almost impossible situation. In the span of one afternoon, the young woman has her life irrevocably changed. Raised in a upper crust family (her father a former police chief), Cristina is called away from her Catholic school one day and informed by a federal judge that her mother and father are not actually her biological parents. Cristina, as expected, resists believing these statements at first, but soon the evidence becomes irrefutable. Against the protests of her adoptive parents, Cristina is placed in the custody of her biological grandmother (Susan Campos), and legally becomes Sofia Lombardi. It turns out that Cristina/Sofia's parents "disappeared" during Argentina's military rule in the 1970s, where the fates of government objectors were, more often than not, very grim ones. As Cristina/Sofia comes to discover, the people she has known as mother and father may even be in some way responsible for the "disappearance" of her natural parents.