Directed by: Fernando Nogueira
Montage: Gustavo Cataldi
Produced by: Maria Cabrejas
Date: 2004
Country: Argentina
Language: Spanish (Spanish subtitles)
Running time: 49'
Availability in the UK: Que...展开en Mary, University of London, Library
Missionnaire is a documentary about Sister Ivonne Pierron's ongoing missionary
work in a remote area in the Province of Misiones (Northeastern corner of
Argentina). Although the film is set in Pueblo Illia [Illia Village] (Misiones), it
opens with panoramic views of the city of Buenos Aires, while a radio newsreader
tells us about France's request for Captain Alfredo Astiz's extradition for the
disappearance and murder of two French nuns during the last Argentine
dictatorship (1976-83). Then, the title sequence gives us the background for
Missionnaire's story: 'Sister Ivonne Pierron, comrade during those years of Alice
Domon and Léoni Duquet, the disappeared nuns, survived.'
The film shows in detail the beautiful and colourful landscape – green soil and
green vegetation – of this rural area, but also the deprivation of its inhabitants.
Most of them have small farms, put their produce commands insufficient prices in
the market. That is why they find it so hard to survive and many children have to
work. Within this context of poverty and deprivation, Sister Ivonne set up a
shelter for children where they receive education, have their meals and pray. The
film presents interviews with these children, their parents and their teachers.
Many of the children interviewed say that they would not be able to study if
Ivonne was not there with her shelter, because they live too far from the schools.
There are also sequences of classroom situations where the pupils learn about the
history of human rights in Argentina under the last military dictatorship. It is then
when Sister Ivonne explains to the pupils what 'dictatorship' means, and how the
concept should not only be applied to the military regime of late 1970s and early
1980s Argentina, but also to the 1990s because the government deprived people
of the possibility of surviving, and thus many peasants and shanty-town dwellers
died in indigence. Ivonne affirms that only the survivors of a dictatorship can tell
the true story. Photographs of Videla and Astiz are inserted, and in some of them
they are in churches, while Ivonne says that the Catholic Church sinned during
the last dictatorship because it did not take a position in relation to the ongoing
violation of Human Rights and did not condemn those responsible for them.
Ivonne considers herself a revolutionary as Jesus Christ and Che Guevara were,
and shows her photograph of Che – which was given to her by Che's father –
while she tells us that the shelter's children know who he was. There are long
interviews with Ivonne, in the last of which she explains her concept of
'liberation', drawing our attention to the fact that the poor are more liberated
from material wealth when they face death than the rich, and in this respect they
die freer than the rich. The film ends with the testimony of a mother who says
that Ivonne 'is another peasant, another nurse, another teacher. Ivonnne is
everything.'