MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
“Iluminados por el Fuego” star returns to the Falklands
Gaston Pauls, star of the film Iluminados por el Fuego (Enlightened by fire), which deals with the appalling treatment handed out to Argentine conscripts both during and after the 1982 conflict, returned to the Falklands last Saturday, accompanied by a TV production team.
By coincidence the team included Maria Rosenfeld, wife of Edgardo Esteban, author of the book, Iluminados por el Fuego, which inspired the film of the same name. Directed by Tristan Bauer, it , has won prizes at several film festivals and been much acclaimed by audiences in Europe and North America, as well as in Argentina.
Asked by Mercopress how he came to be in the film, Gaston Pauls , who is a major film star in his native Argentina, replied simply that he was an actor and was sent the script. He had had no particular desire to be in a film about the Falklands/Malvinas Conflict, particularly if it was going to show one side or other as bad and the other as good. However, he was keen to accept the part offered, once he had read the script and realised that the film would identify that the real enemy for the ordinary Argentine soldier was not the British nor the Falkland Islanders, but his own army.
Gaston Pauls visited the Falklands before, for a week, during the shooting of Iluminados por el Fuego, but the purpose of his present visit is to make an hour long documentary for his own weekly programme Humanos en el Camino (People on the move) which is screened on Argentina's Channel 11, Telefe. At the core of the film will be the return to the Islands of two ex-combatants, veterans of the fighting on Mount Longdon. The programme, according to Gaston, will be full of emotion, and what he hopes it will show is what has happened to the two men over the last twenty-four years and how they are now. He expects that it will be screened in about two weeks time.
Both ex-combatants are now in their early forties, but in 1982 were in their late teens or early twenties, with, says Gaston, "all their lives before them." During the conflict both spent sixty days living on Mount Longdon, facing such deprivation that one of them lost 20kgs of weight. "I was there just for six hours" said Gaston Paul "and I found it very difficult".
Since the end of fighting in 1982, more Argentine ex-combatants have committed suicide than died in the Falklands and Pauls hopes that the film will highlight the failure of both society and successive governments in Argentina to face up to their lack of responsibility for those that were sent to fight, so ill-prepared and, as it turned out, treated so badly.
Although the visit, which has taken the team to Mount Longdon and Darwin, has been on occasions difficult, especially for the two ex-combatants, it appears to have been a worthwhile experience for them, full of sadness, but also spiritual healing. On Tuesday morning at Darwin one of the veterans had looked around him and exclaimed. "Que hermosas son las islas" (How beautiful these islands are). "How marvelous", said Gaston Pauls,"that he can now see the beauty in a place where previously he saw so much horror."
John Fowler (Mercopress) Stanley
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