A retired investigator sits down to write a novel about a case whose resolution was stolen from him by politics. The act of writing opens up a wound he spent twenty-five years trying to heal.

THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (2009), directed by Juan José Campanella, follows Benjamín Espósito, played by Ricardo Darín, as he reconnects in 1999 with Irene Menéndez Hastings, played by Soledad Villamil. Together they revisit the rape and murder of a young newlywed - the investigation that consumed Benjamín’s career. Javier Godino plays the suspect whose arrest should have ended it, before the political violence of the mid-seventies set him free.

Adapted by Campanella and Eduardo Sacheri from Sacheri’s novel La pregunta de sus ojos (The Question in Their Eyes), later reissued under the film’s title. Campanella had been directing episodes of Law & Order, House, and 30 Rock in the United States before returning to Argentina for this. Félix Monti’s cinematography includes a continuous five-minute shot through a packed stadium during a manhunt that has become one of the film’s most studied sequences.

The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, only the second Argentine film to take the prize after The Official Story in 1985, beating Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, a result few predicted.