Eva van Roekel Screening and Discussion

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This event is being held in association with the Centre for Creative Ethnography

Cultural anthropologist and visiting scholar at QUB Anthropology, Eva van Roekel presents a sneak preview of her new film Falling (2026). After the screening we will have a Q&A session and discussion with the filmmaker, moderated by Michael Holly

This film deals with the sensitive topic of how to do filmmaking and research with a person connected to crimes against humanity.

An anthropologist films a former Argentinian paratrooper implicated in the dictatorship’s genocide. Will she be able to navigate polarised moral positions and bring this vexed film to a close?

How to confront the uneasy spaces between memory, violence and moral responsibility in post-dictatorship Argentina? The film follows an anthropologist as she documents a former paratrooper implicated in the 1970s dictatorship’s genocide, a man complicit in torture, disappearances and killings. Neither hero nor villain, he inhabits a shadowy zone of withdrawal from his crimes, obsessively revisiting skydiving videos, old paratrooper photos and memories of jump sites. As the anthropologist films, ethical tensions surface, raising questions about how to engage a perpetrator without condoning him and how to navigate polarized histories and moral “others” without imposing one’s own perspective. The film becomes a meditation on the limits of empathy, the weight of memory and the possibilities and perils of witnessing. Blending essayistic observation, archival material and intimate collaboration, viewers immerse  in the grey zones of human complicity, asking a provocative question: can understanding a violent past help bring it, and those who lived it, to a reflective close?