In 1980, Ricardo Rifo, a peasant from a remote area in southern Chile, was instructed as a police dog trainer by Ingrid Olderöck, the most powerful woman in the secret police of the Chilean civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990). The former agent —who died in 2001 in total impunity— is remembered for the violent methods of sexual torture she carried out in detention centers, where she used her dog on the bodies of political prisoners.
The peasant, four decades later, accompanied by a pack of dogs in the midst of a timeless landscape, as inhospitable as it is devastated, wanders between the difficulty of words and the impossibility of expressing the horror.
Dead Tongue reflects on the matrix of memory in times of suspicion, threat, and death, in the face of the aftermath of the regime in a country whose language has been mutilated.