Context
Hélices is a documentary about the 1971 Kibón tragedy, when two Sikorsky H-34 helicopters collided during a public military event on the Montevideo rambla. The accident transformed a weekend spectacle into a traumatic public event and left victims, families and witnesses carrying questions for decades.
The film was produced by Salado and co-directed by Adrián Barrera and Maxi Contenti. Salado describes it as the first Uruguayan documentary to address facts that had remained hidden for more than forty years.
The documentary is not only about the accident. It is also about memory, silence, institutional opacity, and the long distance between an event that many people witnessed and a public explanation that many people felt never fully arrived.
From Fiction to Documentary
My relationship with Hélices did not begin as a finished documentary concept. It began when Maxi Contenti brought me the idea of a fiction film about the Kibón tragedy and invited me to collaborate in the ideation process and the first script drafts.
The original impulse came from a story Maxi had received through his father, who had witnessed the accident as a teenager. At first, the material seemed to call for fiction: a dramatic reconstruction of a public tragedy that younger generations barely knew.
As we developed the project together, a parallel documentary path emerged. With the newly created Fondos de Incentivo Cultural, we presented a side documentary project to support the investigation behind the fiction script and to explore a subject that had rarely been spoken about publicly. That proposal received funding, and the research gradually opened a new path for the work: the documentary became a way to investigate the tragedy, recover testimonies and address a story that had remained partly buried in public memory.
Research and Interviews
The accident happened during a public celebration of the Armada, when two Sikorsky H-34 helicopters were part of an aerial-military demonstration. Press coverage later described the crash as causing eight deaths and around forty serious injuries.
The research, led by Antonio Pereira, became one of the central strengths of the film. It helped reveal technical problems with the helicopters, the difficult path victims faced when seeking compensation, and the pilots' limited familiarity with the aircraft.
The interviews were not only a way to collect information. They were a way to reopen a conversation that had been avoided, fragmented or postponed. Some victims were reluctant to participate, which made the process harder and also confirmed how delicate the subject still was.
From Idea to Realization
The realization of Hélices was a lesson in how a project can change form when the material demands it. What began around a fiction film became a documentary because reality had more narrative force, more ethical weight and more urgency than the fictional version we first imagined.
The development process started in 2009, when the project won Fondos de Incentivo Cultural. Years later, after research, script work, production and many obstacles, the documentary premiered in 2013 at the Festival de Cine Nuevo Detour.
For me, the most important experience was seeing the project grow from collaboration on an idea and early script drafts into a shared cinematic object. The work had to stop belonging only to the first impulse. It had to become something capable of holding other people’s memories with seriousness and care.
Release and Public Conversation
The documentary had a public life after completion. Montevideo Portal reported that TNU aired Hélices 43 years after the crash, framing it as the first Uruguayan documentary to address a story that had remained hidden for more than forty years.
That television release mattered because the work returned the story to a public space. A documentary about collective memory should not remain private; it needs to circulate, invite discussion and allow new generations to understand why an old wound still matters.
For a project that started with a question about silence, every screening, article and conversation was part of the answer.
Recognition
At ATLANTIDOC 2013, Hélices, revelando una tragedia received the Intendencia Municipal de Canelones “Alberto Mántaras” award for Best Uruguayan Documentary.
The jury highlighted the film for building an intense story through solid journalistic research around a fact that had remained hidden for years and for which the State had not given answers that satisfied the victims.
This recognition was meaningful because it understood the project in the terms that mattered most: not only as a film, but as an act of investigation and memory.
Takeaways
Hélices taught me that an idea can take years to become real, and that this is not necessarily a weakness. Some stories need time before they can be approached responsibly.
It also taught me that documentary filmmaking is not just about finding a topic. It is about earning the right to tell it, building trust, organizing complexity and accepting that the final work belongs to a larger conversation than the one that originated it.
Looking back, I see the project as a bridge between curiosity, research, collective memory and public service. It began with the feeling that something had been left unsaid, and it became a film because many people helped turn that feeling into a serious work.