Argentina convicted Yiya Murano, then gave her a TV career — Netflix asks how

Martín Murano has spent most of his adult life trying to make Argentina stop laughing at his mother. He testified against her in court. He spoke publicly against the television appearances she built a second life out of, after her release from prison in 1993. He refused, again and again, to sign the forgiveness the country seemed willing to grant. Alejandro Hartmann’s new documentary is the first film that takes that decades-long effort seriously as its actual subject — rather than as a footnote to a more colorful figure.

That figure, of course, is Yiya Murano, convicted in 1985 of murdering three of her closest friends with cyanide-laced tea: Nilda Gamba, Lelia “Chicha” Formisano and Carmen Zulema “Mema” del Giorgio de Venturini. The killings were motivated by money she owed them in what functioned, effectively, as a neighborhood pyramid scheme in the Monserrat district of Buenos Aires. The facts of the case have been public for more than forty years. What Death at Tea Time investigates is not the facts. It is the cultural afterlife those facts acquired the moment Yiya walked out of prison and discovered that Argentine television was delighted to have her.

This is the load-bearing decision of the film. Hartmann and producer Vanessa Ragone, working again at Haddock Films after Cabezas and Carmel, could have made a conventional case reconstruction. They had the material. Instead they have made a film about what a country does with a poisoner once the courts are finished with her — and specifically what happens when that country’s entertainment industry decides she is charming.

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The film’s formal strategy carries that argument without announcing it. Hartmann works in hybrid mode: dramatized re-enactments of the 1979 events, testimonial interviews with investigators, journalists and victims’ families, and a substantial archival layer built from 1990s Argentine television. The re-enactments, as several critics have noted, lean heavily on a device the documentary form has largely exhausted. But the archival footage is where the film stops being reconstruction and becomes indictment. Yiya appears on Mirtha Legrand’s midday show and on other prime-time slots, performing her own legend, playing with her infamy for the cameras, and being met with laughter. Hartmann lets those clips run. The duration itself is the argument. The home viewer in 2026 registers the wrongness that the in-studio audience of the 1990s evidently did not.

The surrounding context sharpens that wrongness. The Monserrat poisonings occurred in 1979, at the height of Argentina’s last military dictatorship. A tabloid story about a housewife killing her friends over unpaid debts was useful counter-programming for a press ecosystem that was being asked, in parallel, not to look too closely at other kinds of disappearances. Yiya served thirteen years of effective imprisonment, benefited from the “dos por uno” sentence-reduction provision, and walked free in 1993 after a commutation granted under Carlos Menem. The Argentina she re-entered had built, during her absence, a television economy that rewarded precisely her kind of charisma — self-aware, unapologetic, performing around transgression rather than against it. She thrived in that economy until her death in a Belgrano nursing home in 2014.

Death at Tea Time sits inside a specific lineage of Argentine prestige true-crime documentary. Hartmann and Ragone have built that lineage almost single-handedly. What their earlier films have in common is an investigative texture and a suspicion of institutions — in particular of the media institutions that shape public memory of violent crime. What this film has to break is the genre’s default grammar. Cabezas and Carmel are about cases where the audience enters looking for justice the courts failed to deliver. There is no such gap here. Yiya was tried, convicted, imprisoned, released. Hartmann has to invent a different grammar — not what happened, but what happened after what happened. The Yiya story is also already one of the most-adapted criminal biographies in Argentine culture. Theater productions, a television movie, a fiction series released only months before this documentary. The film has to earn its existence against that saturation, and the argument it makes for itself is that the real subject of the Yiya case has been performed repeatedly as entertainment but never seriously examined as cultural pathology.

The result is that Death at Tea Time refuses most of the reassuring pleasures the Netflix true-crime catalog has conditioned its audience to expect. There is no twist. No wrongful conviction. No mystery about guilt. What the film offers instead is the viewer’s own implication. You are watching a Netflix documentary about a poisoner, produced and distributed inside the same spectacle economy that once turned her into a talk-show guest. The film knows this about itself. That self-knowledge is what distinguishes it from the cheaper end of the genre, and it is also what generates the film’s single most consequential ethical choice: the refusal to give Yiya her own voice. She is dead and the film does not ventriloquize her. No letters are read in voiceover. No actor is asked to give her interiority. She exists in the film only in the form her own celebrity produced — on the couches, in the studios, in the archival footage. The spectacle is permitted to testify against itself.

Martín Murano’s role in the film reflects the same ethical carefulness. He is not a quote supplier. He is the only figure in Argentine public life who has consistently refused the forgiveness the culture extended, and the film positions him as such. That role fell to him, essentially alone, because the culture around him was not prepared to take it up. The isolation of his position is, among other things, the indictment.

What the film cannot and does not answer is whether any documentary, including this one, can do for the victims’ families what forty years of Argentine television conspicuously did not. If a country has already forgiven a murderer by finding her funny, returning the camera to her image — even in critique, even with moral seriousness, even with a son’s testimony as the moral center — is not guaranteed to undo that forgiveness. It may, against the filmmakers’ intentions, extend it. The film refuses to resolve that problem because it cannot be resolved from inside the form that produced it.

Death at Tea Time is directed by Alejandro Hartmann and produced by Vanessa Ragone for Haddock Films, the team behind Carmel: ¿Quién mató a María Marta? and El fotógrafo y el cartero: El crimen de Cabezas. Testimonial voices include Martín Murano and journalist Chiche Gelblung, alongside members of the victims’ families. The film had its festival preview at Cine Gaumont on April 17 as part of BAFICI.

The documentary premieres globally on Netflix on April 23.

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