Distancing memory. The failure of the anti-trauma strategy in Albertina Carri's Los rubios (2003)

Los rubios is one of the films of the postmemory generation, about which most has been written in the field of Trauma Studies. However, while there is some consensus on its approach and strategies of representation, scholars are divided on whether the film's narrative can be categorized as an example of trauma or of the impossibility of trauma. Starting from this dilemma and using, as a methodology, an analysis of the filmic text that focuses on how it constructs the audiovisual discourse, this article argues that although the filmmaker Albertina Carri tries to create distancing strategies throughout the film that allow her to avoid personal trauma in order to carry out a reflexive archaeological study of the past, it is these very postulates that end up leading her to a feeling of trauma. In this sense, the main conclusion is that the film represents a failure of the anti-trauma strategies with which it was begun.