Buenos Aires 1982, close to the end of the military dictatorship. María Teresa (20) is a monitor at a secondary school. She started working when it was still summer and Mr. Biasutto (50), the chief monitor, revealed the attitude she should adopt with students, for it was not easy to get to what he called ‘the exact point’ for the best surveillance. But if everything is out of order, everything is transgression. And when María Teresa, following a vague, maybe inexistent, trail of tobacco smoke, starts hiding in the boys bathroom to catch those smoking in the act, and take them before the authorities, and slowly makes of them a dark and exciting habit, it is not from breaking the rules, but from enforcing them no matter what, that twisting and deviation will arise, from the thorough surveillance for utter correctness, from the inflexible custody of a complete and atrocious normality, because beyond the walls of the school, there is another world, there is a country that almost looks nothing like it.

Three elements from this project are particularly appealing to me: its asceticism and simplicity; the solitary character of a female school’s discipline monitor, and the point of view about a not yet explored historical period (1982) close to the end of the military dictatorship, just before Malvinas War.
I will describe, through the character of the monitor (María Teresa), the political and repressive model implemented by the military regime’s officials, embodied in Chief Monitor Mr. Biasutto. All the things related to the historical period will be off-field, and the off-field feature will apply also to the story itself: a school is what we see, but beyond it there are the streets, the houses, the people, a country.