World Premiere Of EL EQUIPO By Bernardo Ruiz Announced At Santa Barbara Film Festival

El Equipo, the fifth feature film by two-time Emmy nominated director Bernardo Ruiz (The Infinite Race), will have its world premiere at the 38th Santa Barbara Film Festival, taking place February 8-18, 2023, in California, and it will also screen at the 20th Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, running February 17-26 in Missoula, Montana.

Working with a trove of archival materials spanning four decades and unfolding as part procedural, part true crime thriller, El Equipo chronicles the history-making collaboration between Dr. Clyde Snow, a legendary forensic scientist originally from Texas, and a group of Argentine university students, who were dubbed "unlikely forensic sleuths" by The New York Times.

The group of "rag-a-tag" students would go on to form the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which revealed the truth to Argentine families about their disappeared loved ones, generating evidence that led to the conviction of hundreds of perpetrators in and out of government, as depicted recently in the Oscar nominated fiction film Argentina, 1985.

Narrating the evolving relationship between Snow and the forensic team, El Equipo delves into some of the most high-profile cases of the team's history including the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, and later the case of the missing 43 students in Mexico, where members of the team have faced threats, spying and official attempts to discredit their work. Snow's legacy is also examined in countries like Guatemala, where Snow mentored forensic scientist Freddy Peccerelli and helped create a Guatemalan forensic team.

With an unprecedented access to the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team and its archives, El Equipo offers a welcome twist to the to the traditional true crime film by focusing on systemic political and human rights abuses rather than on one-off tales of murder or lone serial killers, and deftly creates a direct link between state atrocities from the past and present.

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