‘The Victors’: a fresh and unsettling take on Malvinas lands right on time

In Argentina, where independent films can take years to make and even longer to reach theaters, it is rare for one to premiere at precisely the right moment. The Victors (originally Los vencedores), director Pablo Aparo’s documentary about his experience in the Malvinas, seems to have been granted — or cursed with — a kind of perfect timing.

Just days after President Javier Milei addressed the nation and intensified Argentina’s sovereignty claim over the islands in a televised speech, accompanied by martial-toned announcements of little immediate consequence, the release of The Victors offers a shift in perspective that is as intelligent as it is moving — and, in a way, astonishing. 

Premiered at the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival earlier this year, where it won both the Great Prize for best film in all competitions as well as the best director award in the international competition, the film is the result of Aparo’s trips to the islands between 2020 and 2024. 

While following a straight documentary format, the film nevertheless provides an unprecedented look at the Malvinas, both of the islands themselves and the people who live there. And it does so by challenging institutional warmongering, empty diplomatic slogans and, most importantly, the assumptions general audiences have long held about the islanders. 

In the beginning, though, Aparo takes us far from the Southern Atlantic seas and deep into ourselves. The first scenes feature an augmented reality exhibition somewhere in mainland Argentina, showing us visitors wearing goggles that simulate the experience of actually being on the islands, a place very few Argentines have visited ever since the war in 1982. 

The effect is clear, highlighting the Argentine people’s both historical and physical distance with the islands, as well as the absence of first-hand experience about what it feels like to be in Malvinas. As if our common knowledge of that particular piece of territory remained the 1980s imagery of a freezing and hostile desert, a picture that has been only partially updated by a handful of contemporary audiovisual reports. 

The Victors then begins as a regular, testimony-driven research with a skillful eye, slowly taking us further and further into life on the islands. Aparo interviews both public officials and everyday islanders, and, probably for the first time, allows them to freely elaborate on camera about the place they call home, as well as their views on Argentina. 

Quickly, the film’s calm and respectful tone stands out for the way it portrays the islanders, whose perspective has so far been silence in the Argentine state’s diplomatic strategy — they are officially considered either an inserted population and/or foreign enemy invaders. But today, people living on the islands have been there for generations. 

Sovereignty issues aside, the truth is that throughout the years families have formed there, immigrants from all over have settled and thrived, and an entire community has developed a way of living — this is, in the end, what The Victors sheds new light on.

Although some social scuffles with the locals do occur, Aparo’s camera is mostly welcomed by everyone who sits in front of it. The film intertwines beautiful images of the sunlit, lively islands — including breathtaking views and paradise beaches — with an array of testimonies and honest views. This includes, yes, the people’s memories of the war itself and the Argentine landing of 1982. 

In the case of those who were alive back then, the anecdotes range from their occasional empathy with hungry teenage Argentine soldiers suffering abuse from superiors to the harsh living conditions civilians experienced while imprisoned under the temporary Argentine rule.

A bomb on preconceptions Aparo’s interviews also reveal the unexpected, such as the islanders’ fear the Argentine military would use on them the same terrorist methods they used against their own people — torture and disappearance. One elderly man goes beyond, describing being captured and flown to Uruguay, and how he feared the Argentine soldiers would throw him alive from the airplane into the sea. 

His testimony feels like Aparo just dropped a bomb on Argentina’s common preconceptions about islanders. On one hand, it proves that by 1982 the dictatorship’s method of mass extermination was widely known abroad. But on the other, it serves the uncomfortable notion that the Argentine people and the islanders may have faced a common enemy. 

By then, The Victors already delivered an original and brave portrait of the islanders’ life and mindset, but then Aparo decides to take his camera inland, and into what will become the core of the film. 

The director moves into the far rural settlement of hermit Matthew McMullen, a die-hard anti-Argentina livestock farmer. McMullen, with his rough manners and intense mindset, instantly becomes a protagonist. Throughout the experience of living together, their deep conversations, and heated discussions, The Victors almost takes the shape of a buddy movie, or a western-like story of opposite-natured characters colliding and forced to coexist. 

The bond between Aparo and McMullen thus grows into an unexpected, volatile friendship — one that will even have a toll on the local man’s relationship with the rest of the islanders.

The film’s third protagonist is barely seen, yet it looms like an invisible elephant in the room: a major British Armed Forces base, which houses a couple of thousand troops and almost the same amount of civilians living on the island. While Aparo is not allowed to film it, the fighter jets crossing the sky are a constant, itchy reminder that the island remains a colonial, military enclave thousands of miles from Great Britain. 

By questioning the islanders about the heavily militarized assurance that enables their society, the film stands not just as a depiction of Malvinas people, but as a comprehensive reflection that will surely outlive any circumstantial uses of the Malvinas issue for petty political goals. 

On the opposite side of opportunism and pathetic saber-rattling, The Victors can rightfully claim its place as a new and thorough cinematic standpoint on an essential piece of Argentine past, present and future history.

Editorial disclaimer: Although the UK refers to the territory as the “Falkland Islands,” Argentina strongly contests this name. The Buenos Aires Herald uses “Malvinas” to refer to the islands.