In Guita Schyfter’s El águila y el gusano, an intricate plot serves to intersect the destinies of several characters: the owner of a beauty salon in love with “all things Chinese”, a politician with a taste for oration who couldn’t care less about the problems of his country, a political adviser whose counsel is never considered and a shady investigator with a name that nobody seems to recall. The script by Schyfter and Hugo Hiriart, her longtime collaborator and author of the 2013 novel on which the film is based, bristles with finely-crafted, hilarious dialogue.
A love story turned assassination against the backdrop of the 1968 student massacre whose unresolved status is finally resolved in tense life threatening conditions. The story of a stubborn journalist who undertakes the clarification and bringing to justice of the heinous murder of one student forty years later represents a dedicated effort to force a country from denial to reconciliation and closure of tragic social and political events in a country´s history. A nation cannot allow official cover-ups that seek to delete and erase from the collective memory events that prevent a nation´s march towards social justice.