ALBERTINA CARRI'S LOS RUBIOS CHRONICLES THE FILMMAKER'S SEARCH FOR HER PARENTS, AND SEEKS TO MAKE SENSE OF ARGENTINA'S VIOLENT PAST

While making Los Rubios (The Blondes), director Albertina Carri often listened to Charly Garcia's ''Influencia (Influence).'' Finding in the Argentine rocker's evocative lyrics -- which make references to the inescapable impressions left when someone goes away -- parallels to her own story, she incorporated the song into the film as a kind of anthem. Los Rubios could be described as a cinematic reconstruction of Carri's memory of her parents, who were kidnapped and killed during the late '70s military regime in Argentina. Carri was a toddler when her parents were grabbed from their home in the province of Buenos Aires in 1977, never to be seen again; they were among the estimated 30,000 people who became known as desaparecidos (the disappeared), forcibly taken by the military, most of whom vanished without a trace. After their parents' abduction, Carri and her sisters were taken in by relatives.

The fact that Los Rubios won the audience prize at last year's Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival is confirmation that Carri's story is one with which many of her contemporaries can identify. The children of the disappeared have come of age, and many are now searching for information about their families. Some have only recently learned that they were born in captivity and as babies were adopted by the same military officers responsible for the deaths of their parents. ''For me, it was important to make a film about my generation,'' Carri says in an e-mail from Buenos Aires. ``A film about the legacy of that era.''

Los Rubios combines documentary and fiction to create a film that is less about a search for the director's parents than an attempt to manifest her own identity within the framework of what happened to them. Carri and her crew do go back to her old neighborhood to interview those who knew her parents, and they examine old photos and press relatives and family friends for information about her mother and father. But Los Rubios is not a narrative strung together from testimonials and anecdotes; it's mostly a story about Carri's complex experience of making such a personal film.

The director casts an actress to represent herself, and she inserts animated segments as a way of illustrating her memories of the past. Carri's unorthodox approach purposefully differs from that of '80s Argentine filmmakers who first explored the subject of the disappeared in dramatic movies such as La historia oficial (The Official Story) and La noche de los lapices (The Night of the Pencils).

''I never wanted to do a historical movie about the '70s,'' Carri says. ``I thought it was important to construct a narrative about memory -- which is in fact what's left from that past, glorious or not -- and to think about memory, you inevitably have to do it from the present point of view. I'm obliged to reconstruct my parents, and that's exactly what's so terrible about this story: They are not reconstructable.''

The subjective nature of memory, as well as the shadows that remain over that era in Argentina's history, becomes cruelly evident when Carri and crew go seek out her family's old neighbors. Almost three decades later, some are still afraid to speak for fear of repercussions, others claim ignorance, and still others implicate themselves as malicious onlookers (or even collaborators) who speculate about her parents' character, delivering misinformation with alarming authority.

''Part of the legacy of that time is the attitude of the generation that precedes mine,'' says Carri. ``This festered and incomprehensible fear, this necessity to feel like the protagonists and heroes of the past. The great majority are people who actively participated and who today are very afraid that they will be judged, so they think that any opinion other than theirs is irreverent or simply out of place. What these people have not understood is that beyond the fact that it's their story, it's mine too, even if I was only four years old when this happened.''

In Los Rubios, the handful of people with whom Carri makes the film gradually emerge as a kind of surrogate family for her. At the end, as Garcia's ''Influencia'' plays, they don blonde wigs and walk off through a field and, symbolically, into the future. This and other scenes can be perceived as more affected than affecting; and at times Carri's overtly arty techniques are distracting, or even irksome. But overall, Los Rubios is a provocative and brave work in which Carri takes history into her own hands and is not afraid to insolently point a finger at hypocrisy and fear. She also has the courage to accept that the past cannot somehow be resolved and put to rest by making a film.

''Someone is evoked, that's why memories are constructed; something has already happened, but nonetheless here we are,'' Carri says. ``Here we are and we relive it a thousand different ways.''

Los Rubios will screen 6:30 p.m. Thursday, February 5, at the Regal South Beach Cinema, 1100 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach, as part of the Miami International Film Festival.

DANCE CUBA

Internationally acclaimed dancer Carlos Acosta and Washington Ballet artistic director Septime Webre will appear at the Miami Film Festival screening of Dance Cuba: Dreams of Flight. Director/producer Cynthia Newport will also be there to present the film, which she describes as ''a constellation of stories that share the beauty and power of dance and the beauty and power of Cuba.'' The documentary chronicles the history of the ballet in Cuba and follows some of its leading dancers as their careers take them abroad. Dance Cuba also documents a historic Havana performance by the Washington Ballet, which allowed its Cuban-American artistic director a chance to revisit his family's past.

Cuban jazz piano great Chucho Valdés -- who was originally scheduled to appear at the screening, but will not be making the trip -- composed the score for the film, the exhilarating soundtrack of which also includes classic Cuban songs, bluesy jazz, and Afro-Cuban folkloric drumming. ''Chucho and I talked a lot about the poignancy and reflection that are present in the film,'' Newport says. Valdés recorded the accompaniment to Dance Cuba on a soundstage in New York, one of the film's locales. ''Several times [Acosta] leapt right on top of the piano,'' Newport reports.

Dance Cuba screens 9:45 p.m. Thursday at the Regal South Beach Cinema, 1100 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach.