Made by an Argentinian director working out of Italy, Garage Olimpo (Olimpo Garage) is the kind of valuable cultural product that symbolises political regeneration. It takes for its theme Argentina's thousands of desaparecidos ("the disappeared") who went missing, for murky political reasons, during Argentina's military dictatorship. Between 1976 and 1980, some 25,000 people "disappeared" under Argentina's military junta; even as the country celebrated its World Cup victory, many were being tortured in Buenos Aires or taken on "death flights" - drugged and dropped alive into the ocean from military aircraft.

Himself a victim of the country's regime - he was forced to leave Argentina in 1977, at the age of 20, for political reasons - director Marco Bechis has the necessary moral authority to make this film. Working from a budget of around $3 million, Bechis uses this backdrop to tell the kind of complex morality tale that Hollywood is fond of - how "normal" people turn evil; how ideology affects the inner life. But as with such memorable films as Costa Gavras' The Music Box and Polanski's adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's Death And The Maiden, such stories resonate more strongly when based on realities that implicate us all.

Maria (Antonella Costa), a 19-year-old teacher and political activist, works in a Buenos Aires shantytown. She lives with her mother Diane (Dominique Sanda), who rents a room to timid but mysterious Felix (Carlos Echeverria), who claims to be in love with María. Maria is kidnapped by plain-clothes police and taken to the Garage Olimpo torture centre where, in a perverse twist, she discovers that Felix has been assigned to torture her. As the moral questions multiply, real life carries on as normal outside the doors of the Garage.

Bechis cut his cinematic teeth in Italy, post-exile, on shorts and medium-length pieces such as Absent (1984) and the experimental Storie Metropol-itane (1988). His first feature, 1991's Alambrado, is a story of social and economic conflict on the Magellan Straits.

Garage Olimpo is co-produced by 26-year-old Argentinian whizz-kid Daniel Burman, who produced Fernando Diaz's well-received Soul Square (1998) and directed the Sundance-featured A Chrysanthemum Explodes In Cincoesquinas. Jonathan Hollander