They Shot the Piano Player by Trueba and Mariscal
From 1976 through 1983, a military dictatorship ruled Argentina and clung to power through terror. One of their instruments of fear was the disappearance of thousands of people suspected of leftist sympathies. Among those who fell into their net was a Brazilian musician, Francisco Tenorio.
Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal imaginatively recreate his story and the search for what happened to him in their graphic novel They Shot the Piano Player. Using bright colors for scenes in the present and black and white for memories, they make a case for Tenorio as a great lost artist, a pianist at the heart of bossa nova (albeit usually as a sideman). The story they tell echoes the torrent of investigations and court trials in Argentina in recent years as the nation reckons with its past. Much of the focus is on the activities of the innocuously named Naval Mechanics School, which became a place of torture. Prisoners held there were “transferred” to planes, their bodies dropped into the Atlantic never to be recovered. Tenorio was among them.
They Shot the Piano Player is also a look back at a vibrant musical culture that flourished in South America during an era of tyranny.
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