Circular Times It is the story of 4 inseparable friends united by a common event, the death of their parents. Their revenge is to be happy.
Tiempos Circulares is grounded in a deep conviction: storytelling is a vital act. In a world saturated with fragmented information, the documentary reclaims the spoken word as a space for meaning, experience, and transformation. The voices that inhabit the film do more than recount stories—they live them, process them, and pass them on.
From Walter Benjamin’s perspective, storytelling is a way of preserving and sharing lived experience. Through narrative, experience becomes transmitted wisdom, and personal memory is woven into collective memory. The documentary echoes this tradition of the narrator as a weaver of meaning—one who does not impose answers, but lets experience speak for itself.
At the same time, the film aligns with Sigmund Freud’s notion of psychic elaboration: each shared story is an attempt to reframe trauma, to give shape to pain, and to heal through words. Storytelling is not merely testimony; it is a process—a way of releasing what has been silenced.
Finally, in dialogue with Carl Gustav Jung, Tiempos Circulares brings forth narratives that resonate with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. The film’s circular structure reflects a continual return to essential human themes: loss, time, transformation. In this sense, storytelling also becomes a path of individuation—a journey that connects the personal with the universal.
Through this interplay of memory, psychic elaboration, and symbolic resonance, the documentary affirms storytelling as a profoundly human gesture: resisting oblivion, inhabiting time, and finding meaning in what has been lived.
“The death of their parents, which occurred during the last civil-military dictatorship in Argentina in 1976, leads two pairs of brothers -Carli and Pablo De la Fuente, and Ramiro and Martín Fresneda- to a journey through different stages of their lives. These closing circles include: 1) the Cortázar Workshop (1983/84), 2) The H.I.J.O.S. group (1995) and 3) the Trials for Crimes against Humanity in Córdoba (2008-2016). In that journey the magic always happens. The music, the guitar and the drums, the barbecue, and hugs.
MOTIVATION OF THE DIRECTOR:
To try to tell a reality is to try to change it.
TIEMPOS CIRCULARES. An hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, life as a spiral. Everything is divided into cycles , like the Cycles of nature. This perspective suggests that patterns and events repeat over time, and that the past, present and future are interconnected in a more fluid way than in the linear view.
The film TIEMPOS CIRCULARES generate questions that allow us to connect with life experiences. That questions help us to understand who we are as a society: What each generation has to do? What struggles can be re-signified today? How is our history part of who we are today? Why is the past important for our present?
In this documentary we ask ourselves if history is circular. It seems that things tend to repeat themselves. On the one hand, there is a desire that leads us to the encounter with what we like. Meeting friends, the hug, the laughter, the barbecue, the toast and the music. On the contrary, we have the responsibility to work so that the horror is never repeated. Because the price is too dangerous for the whole society. It is up to us not to lose our memory. The trap lies in fact that history always come back but in disguise. After the Second World War, human rights were created as a promise that the hell of the Holocaust would never happen again. That is why we need to tell it.
Circular Times is about the healing spaces that contributed to close those deep wounds.
The recovery of historical archives was fundamental for this work. The rescue of the photos of the Cortázar Workshop and the discovery of the TV program where these same protagonists, only 18 years old, already showed that they did not want revenge, but restorative justice, proves it. We also see it in the 1995 historical archive of that initiation camp, where the H.I.J.O.S. group was born. We are surprised by the clarity and validity of the debates held by those young people. They are those promises that were made, achieving what seemed impossible. To carry out the trials for crimes against humanity that allowed justice to be done, to condemn the murderers, and to contribute to the construction of memory and social reparation.
The narrative device we use is the journey of these four friends throughout their lives.
“Revenge is to be happy.” This phrase that resonates in the film is interpreted as an oxymoron. Running the axis towards the pursuit of happiness through individual transformation along with the collective one.
Probably today the way to make the revolution is not the same, but there are things that are still valid. Art, music, the encounter and the search to find oneself in the other. Perhaps that is the secret, to commit oneself to a collective cause to give meaning to life.
Andres Dunayevich. Director