Out of an aeroplane hatch, paper cutout people tumble into the sky and crash to the ground. During their fall, their names, ages and dates of disappearance appear in titles. This scene is from the documentary short Abuelas (2011), which blends animation with real-life testimonies in its tale about family life during the 1976–83 military dictatorship in Argentina, when an estimated 30,000 people disappeared into secret detention centres, many of them tortured and finally killed, their bodies buried in unmarked graves, or secretly dispatched, drugged but still alive, from planes out at sea. At a panel discussion, its Iranian-born director, Afarin Eghbal, and British screenwriter Francesca Gardiner explained that that their reason for making the film was that these atrocities had taken place in their lifetime and, yet, like many of their generation or younger, they had previously known nothing about them (Eghbal and Gardiner 2011).

This chapter focuses on the art of imagining and remembering the disappearances in Chile and Argentina in films made by filmmakers from those countries and from abroad. Each of these films responds to the political ‘art’ of disappearance with a particular kind of cinematic experience, ranging from thrillers (Imagining Argentina and Chronicle of an Escape), through poetic, performative and animated documentaries (Nostalgia for the Light, The Blonds and Abuelas), to surreal narrative (Post Mortem). Critics who have written about these (or similar) films in the context of national cinema studies have noted that they are concerned with memory (Page 2009; Sorensen 2009). But, as these films are made at least in part for transnational audiences, how do they encourage those audiences to identify with memories they have never had?

A frequent criticism of films aimed at global markets is that they ‘minimize specific referential markers’ and ‘gloss over’ the complexities of the past so as not to alienate audiences from ‘elsewhere’ (Podalsky 2011: 60). In this chapter, I argue that these films about the disappearances construct ‘memory-worlds’ and ‘dream-worlds’, containing both general and specific referents, that act as mnemonic triggers, capable of interfering with, and disturbing, our own personal and cultural memories.