I just watched this charming film starring Steve Coogan and Jonathan Pryce. I don’t know what made me pick it from the seemingly infinite options that the streaming service Netflix provides, since I did not know anything about it. It was just on a whim, probably inspired by the fact that Coogan acts in interesting films, but I am glad I did so. Coogan plays Tom Michell, a teacher of English who takes up a position at an exclusive private school in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the 1970s. This school, whose headmaster is played by Pryce, is modeled after elite private prep schools in England and its students come from the wealthy ruling class. In the film, Michell is an itinerant teacher who is a loner and not politically active, seeking only to keep his head down and not get involved.

The film is based on a memoir by Michell and is built around the central true event, in which he rescues a penguin he found on a beach that was littered with dead penguins because they were covered in oil from a spill. But there was one that was still alive and Michell cleaned it up. But then the penguin (named Juan Salvador by Michell) refused all Michell’s efforts to guide it back into the wild, clearly seeing him as its life-long friend. So he smuggles the penguin back into his rooms at the school whose policies prohibit pets and tries to keep its presence secret while he tries to get the zoo to take it. His housekeeper and her granddaughter, who is her assistant, discover the presence of Juan Salvador and befriend the penguin and help him with its care.

The backdrop to the film deals with the political turmoil in Argentina in that period where rampant inflation prevailed and there was a military takeover in 1976 followed by a brutal crackdown on students, trade unionists, writers, journalists, artists and any other dissenters and supporters of democracy. What struck me was how much the US now is like Argentina then. In the film, we see armed men in street clothes kidnap the granddaughter of Michell’s housekeeper off the street in broad daylight, bundle her into an unmarked car, and drive off, with no indication of where she was taken. But even there, the men were not wearing masks as they do here. Michell witnesses this kidnapping and like all the other bystanders, does nothing out of fear of also being beaten by the goons. But this act of cowardice weighs on him and he later reluctantly gets drawn into trying to get her released.

Such acts of kidnapping were widespread during that time now known as ‘The Dirty War‘, leading to about 30,000 people who disappeared and most of whom were most likely killed. This spawned a movement known as the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo in which mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared would regularly assemble in a plaza with photographs of the disappeared hanging round their necks, to exert pressure for information about them and for their return. Following her granddaughter’s kidnapping, Michell’s housekeeper joins the group. The group continues to assemble to this day, still trying to find answers to their loved ones’ fates. In 2011, Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo received the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize in Paris.

The political messaging of the film is subtle, making the point that we all need to be part of the effort to retain freedom and democracy and that we cannot really look away when those around us are taken away.

Given how people are now being disappeared in the US, I wonder whether we may see the similar emergence here of a movement of mothers and grandmothers regularly gathering in public places carrying photos of their missing children. That might serve as a powerful consciousness-raising campaign. Even the murderous goons of the Argentinian military junta desisted from charging into the group of grandmothers and beating them in order to disperse them, no doubt because of fears about how bad that would look and how it might enrage the population. It is not at all clear that the goons of ICE, CBP, and the other members of the Trump cult would be similarly restrained.

Here’s the trailer.

Steve Coogan and Tom Michell were interviewed about the story. Watching the film I was convinced that the penguin was CGI but Coogan says that there was no CGI, that they used a real pair of penguins except when there was the possibility of doing something that might distress it, such as carrying it in a bag (when they used a muppet) or throwing it into the ocean (when they used a robotic penguin).

Coogan was also interviewed on The Daily Show.