Abstract
This article presents the first progress around the investigation �The representations of the recent past that are built in films directed by children of people who have disappeared as a result of state terrorism in the 70s� belonging to the UNLP (National University of La Plata) Initiation Grant which was proposed as the central node of the investigations for the Plan of Communication PhD at the College of Journalism and Social Communication � UNLP. Two main topics are particularly analysed in this work: the background to the subject so as to be able to build up the experience and the course followed by the researcher in the construction of subject matter and perspective; and also, an approach to the analysis of documentary films that make up the corpus from the analysis of Bill Nichols' modes of representation.