Remembering the other, repositioning oneself: the right to a biography and autocommunication in perpetrator and collaborator descendant documentaries*

ABSTRACT Can the perpetrator or the collaborator “speak”? How, and for whom? Do they have a “right to a biography” and, if so, what are the terms of this right? Who can speak for them? In short, what does it mean to work through their lives and the crimes they committed for those who decide to tell their stories? The main goal of this paper is to answer these questions using a particular kind of documentary directed by those who, in a certain moment of their lives, have discovered that a member of their families was a perpetrator or a collaborator relating to a dictatorship. Using Lotman’s theory of culture and memory, we discuss the positionalities of those who “wrote” these documentaries, located constantly between the individual and the collective semiosphere. Taking into account two case studies – El pacto de Adriana directed by Lissette Orozco (Chile, 2017) and L’occhio di vetro directed by Duccio Charini (Italy, 2020) – we look at the mechanisms of investigation and recollection that they use and “show,” in order to elucidate family secrets within the broader contexts of the collective traumas of Chile’s and Italy’s post-conflict societies.