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

Can the perpetrator or the collaborator “speak”? How, and forwhom? Do they have a“right to a biography”and, if so, what arethe terms of this right? Who can speak for them? In short, whatdoes it mean to work through their lives and the crimes theycommitted for those who decide to tell their stories? The maingoal of this paper is to answer these questions using a particularkind of documentary directed by those who, in a certain momentof their lives, have discovered that a member of their families wasa perpetrator or a collaborator relating to a dictatorship. UsingLotman’s theory of culture and memory, we discuss thepositionalities of those who“wrote”these documentaries, locatedconstantly between the individual and the collectivesemiosphere. Taking into account two case studies–El pacto deAdrianadirected by Lissette Orozco (Chile, 2017) andL’occhio divetrodirected by Duccio Charini (Italy, 2020)–we look at themechanisms of investigation and recollection that they use and“show,”in order to elucidate family secrets within the broadercontexts of the collective traumas of Chile’s and Italy’s post-conflict societies