Evita, The Documentary by Eduardo Montes-Bradley

EVITA — The most balanced portrait yet of one of the twentieth century's most polarizing political figures. Originally blacklisted in Argentina. Now the most widely viewed film in the Heritage Film Project catalogue. From an illegitimate birth in rural Argentina, delivered by a Mapuche midwife in 1919, to the balcony of the Casa Rosada and the most extraordinary accumulation of political power any woman had achieved on the continent — Eva Duarte de Perón rose from humiliation to apotheosis in three decades. This documentary traces every stage: the provincial cruelty of her childhood in Los Toldos, the struggling actress years in Buenos Aires, the meeting with Colonel Perón at a 1944 earthquake benefit that changed both their lives, the founding of the Eva Perón Foundation, the controversial Rainbow Tour through Franco's Spain and the Vatican, her renunciation of the vice presidency before two million Argentines, and the cervical cancer that killed her at thirty-three. It also tells the story most accounts avoid: the seventeen-year posthumous odyssey of her embalmed body. Stolen by the military in 1955. Hidden in attics and movie theaters. Smuggled to Milan in 1957 and buried under a fictitious name — María Maggi de Magistris — in a grave whose paperwork lists a date of death that does not exist on any calendar. Exhumed fourteen years later. Returned to Perón in Madrid. Brought home, finally, to Recoleta. Written and directed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley. Through extensive archival footage and a disciplined script that refuses both the saint of Peronist mythology and the demon of anti-Peronist counter-mythology, Evita peels back layers of legend to reveal the woman, the symbol, and the legacy still debated seventy years after her death. A Heritage Film Project production.