Corporate Accountability review – collaboration with Argentinian state terror exposed

Jonathan Perel's low-key doc focuses on the companies, still in business, which collaborated with the killings and torture that followed 1976 coup

Jonathan Perel has made a stealthily powerful one-man documentary about corporate involvement in human rights atrocities during Argentina's military dictatorship after the 1976 coup. It's an account of how companies assisted in state terror: the kidnap, torture and murder of employees considered subversive, mostly trade unionists or political activists.

Perel's approach is startlingly - almost maddeningly - plain. Like a private detective, he parks his car outside 25 companies exposed by a 2005 government report about corporate accountability and the repression of workers during the regime. Over the footage he films from his car documenting the mundane comings and goings outside the buildings today, Perel calmly reads extracts from the report's case studies.