Portrait de l’artiste après sa mort (France 41 – Argentine 78)

A theatrical investigation spanning two eras – the French occupation and the Argentine dictatorship – to pay tribute to artists crushed by authoritarian regimes.

Hardly have we settled in when an actor (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo), alone on stage, recounts to us in an intimate face-to-face an strange episode of his life, concerning an apartment in Buenos Aires of which he would be the sole heir, but subject to legal proceedings following a possible seizure during the military dictatorship.

To attend the trial and learn more about this suddenly resurfaced story from the past, Marcial Di Fonzo Bo and director Davide Carnevali fly to Argentina, where they discover that this mysterious apartment belonged to an Argentine composer of Italian origin. A certain Luca Misiti, presumed political dissident, who in 1978 – the year of his disappearance – was working on the unfinished scores of a Jewish composer, himself disappeared forty years earlier…

Thus begins a historical investigation unfolding at the heart of a personal story that traverses two authoritarian regimes – the Argentine military dictatorship and, in parallel, the French occupation by the Nazi regime – to give voice again to the one who was silenced.

Between mockumentary and true fiction, Portrait of the Artist After His Death offers us, through the lives of men silenced, a sublime framework to think about the barbarism of totalitarian regimes that have multiplied in the past, and could multiply in the future.