In 2008, Mariano, a doctor in Turin, received a summons from Buenos Aires to testify about the crimes of the Argentine dictatorship, during which he was kidnapped and tortured in the “Garage Olimpo” and ended up collaborating with the military. In Argentina, he meets other witnesses from all over the world, who look at him with suspicion: they too had to deal with their captors, but they believe that Mariano has gone too far. He meets Evelyn, the daughter of a desaparecida he betrayed, and discovers that Doctor K, the camp doctor who forced him to become his assistant, is in the audience. Confronted with his own guilt, Mariano finally finds the courage to testify.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES:
With Ritorno a Buenos Aires, I return to Argentina fifty years later. I return with a story that is not my own, yet one that springs from a wound I know well. I, too, was abducted during the Argentine dictatorship, but Mariano is not me. I chose fiction because, at times, it is the only way of approaching a truth that memory alone cannot tell.
What does it mean to survive? For a long time, I imagined cinema might offer an escape from that question. It never did. Mariano returns to Buenos Aires to testify in court. Through his story, I wanted to explore the moment when the past breaks into the present once again.
I wanted a restrained directing style, one that neither explains nor condemns. What mattered to me were the silences, the faces, the slow passage of waiting, and the places where the past has left its mark. In the end, the film is about a single thing: the survivor’s guilt that never quite lets go.