Corporate Accountability

This film is based on a book that has never been printed: the report by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, that organises for the first time the 25 case studies where corporate accountability in the repression of their workers can be demonstrated.

Making visible, and sustaining this visibility over time is something that Jonathan Perel pursues with rigour, resolution and simplicity. His new feature-length film (after Toponimia in 2015) fills the physical absence of a report by the Argentinian Ministry of Justice and Human Rights documenting twenty-five cases in which national and international companies became active accomplices of a dictatorship that from 1976 repressed its opponents and its working class – establishing lists of union workers to be eliminated, providing the army with a logistical support or creating secret detention centres on their premises. The existence, availability and paradoxical physical absence of this never-published report clearly reflect the presence of this neo-liberal complicity, whose repressive potential is always imminent. If the evidence and documents produce no effect despite their abundance, what is lacking? Convinced that trauma cannot be eliminated without creating a body to materialise it, Perel produces images that have the ruggedness and precision of reality without ever being sombre. Reviving a dense text in a haunting reading, he collects images of logos and façades of the companies responsible, on his journey of over 14,000 kilometres. The simplicity of the structure frees the performative dimension of the gesture: the fixedness of an onboard camera in the car’s interior, the frontality of pure time, the obstinate presence of a legality lying in wait.

Antoine Thirion