Director: Diego Yaker
Four decades after fleeing Buenos Aires, a woman receives an envelope that reopens a wound she never fully closed.
What is A Giraffe on the Balcony about?
Lidia Muñoz has spent most of her adult life in Barcelona, having escaped Argentina in 1978 while pregnant, during a period when the ruling military dictatorship targeted her for disappearance. Her partner at the time, Oscar Medina, was never as fortunate. Now retired and settled into a quiet routine with her grown daughter Valeria nearby, Lidia is summoned by Argentina's Ministry of Justice to testify in a long-delayed trial addressing Oscar's kidnapping and disappearance. The request forces her to revisit a past she rebuilt her entire life around avoiding, and to decide what she owes to memory, to her daughter, and to a country that once tried to erase her.
Cast & crew
Andrea Frigerio anchors the film as Lidia, with support from Juan Leyrado and Mirta Busnelli rounding out a cast drawn largely from Argentine and Spanish film and television.
Context & significance
Set across two countries and two eras, the film moves between the daily rhythms of exile in Barcelona and the unresolved legal reckoning waiting back in Buenos Aires, a structure common to dramas dealing with Argentina's dictatorship-era disappearances. Running just over ninety minutes, the story stays close to Lidia's point of view rather than widening into a courtroom procedural, keeping the emotional weight on her private negotiation with a past she spent decades trying to outrun. The Argentina-Spain co-production draws on a well-established European tradition of exile dramas that examine how ordinary families carry the aftershocks of state violence long after headlines move on.
Where & how to watch
A Giraffe on the Balcony streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles available, alongside a fully Farsi-language browsing experience. A K-Time account and login are required to watch; the page itself is free to read.