Argentina

nvasion is the legend of a city, real or imagined, under attack by powerful enemies and defended by a handful of men who may not be heroes. They will carry on their struggle to the finish, unaware that the battle is endless.

“Two analogous experiences, distant from each other, now live in my memory. The oldest has been with me since 1923: I’m referring to that afternoon when I held in my hands the first copy of my first book. The other, the recent one, is the emotion I felt when I saw Invasion on the screen. A printed book is not so different from a manuscript; a film is a visible projection, detailed, heard, enriched, and magical os something dreamed, barely descried. As I am one of the authors, I cannot allow myself to priase it. I would like to leave in writing, however, that Invasion es loke no other film, and it might well be the first of a new fantastic genre” –Jorge Luis Borges, Buenos Aires, April 1969Read More »

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Clocking in at only 70 minutes, Argentine director Pablo Fendrik’s unsparingly tense drama El Asaltante (AKA The Assailant, 2007) observes – in real-time – the various conflicting emotions undergone by a perpetrator before he commits a serious and potentially lethal act of aggression. After premeditating the event in his mind for ages, the titular assailant opts to move forward, step by step, and experiences a co-mingling of fear, apprehension, rage, and an overriding loss of hope that will ultimately drive him to commit the most desperate act of his life.Read More »

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This production was shot in the province of Buenos Aires while the ruling generals were yet in power, and was released in the midst of the election period in 1983 when leftist radicals retired the Perónists, an event that this work helped bring about, in large part due to a graphic depiction of right-wing death squads, murdered hostages and torture, being most certainly a film of seminal importance to those having knowledge of the Perónist periodRead More »

From Argentina, this film is called Abrir puertas y ventanas in Spanish, “To Open Doors and Windows.” And indeed the first time director, Milagros Mumenthaler, has a fixation on these two apertures: the camera is always catching a window or a door being gone through, opened, slammed. As has been remarked by others, it is the visuals that appeal in this slow-moving, delicate film. Less appealing and not deeply explored are the protagonists — three sisters, though they don’t resemble each other. Marina (Maria Canale), a college student and the most responsible one of the three, doesn’t want anything to change. The irritable and uncooperative Sofia (Martina Juncadella) is an obvious contrast, constantly changing outfits and rearranging or disposing of the decor. The listless Violeta (Ailin Salas) lies about scantily clad, most of the time too lazy even to get fully dressed. Something is off, but it takes a while to find out what — their grandmother and guardian, a university professor, has recently died of a heart attack. Hanging around in their comfortable house and troubled by family secrets, the sisters appear to have few friends and no other family. Though Maria occasionally goes off to school, they all seem largely immobilized, it would seem as much by laziness, the heat, and boredom as by grief; or they may need to express grief and lack the energy to do so. They can’t be bothered to go to a video shop and merely telephone to order a movie to be delivered — “A comedy,” “Something that’s not Argentinean.”Read More »

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“El poder de las tinieblas” (Power of Darkness) is a film based upon a famous novel by argentinian writer Ernesto Sábato INFORME SOBRE CIEGOS. Its plot is simple and powerful: a person begins to believe that every blind man he sees is persecuting him. This fear is gradually growing to reach unexpectable points. The plot is ok, but actors are not playing good enough and, therefore, the film is not so good as the book. Anyway, I think it is a good defy to comprehend some of the not always successful relationships between literature and cinema.Read More »

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Knowingly, even aggressively sexual, 16-year-old Martin (newcomer Javier De Pietro) locks his seductive sights on Sebastian (Carlos Echevarria), his recently engaged, 30-something swimming instructor. Faking an injury, Martin eventually tricks his teacher into letting him spend the night at his apartment. As Sebastian begins to realize the possible sexual interest on the part of his student, he is conflicted. He is dismissive, but his curiosity is piqued by the boy’s overt advances. An extraordinary event soon forces the increasingly troubled Sebastian to question his own feelings for young Martin. Absent is not a simple boy-meets-boy drama. It’s a taut, and at times, incredible sexy drama of repressed passion, guilt and regret.Read More »

Synopsis
The release of Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga heralded the arrival of an astonishingly vital and original voice in Argentine cinema. With a radical and disturbing take on narrative, beautiful cinematography, and a highly sophisticated use of on- and offscreen sound, Martel turns her tale of a dissolute bourgeois extended family, whiling away the hours of one sweaty, sticky summer, into a cinematic marvel. This visceral take on class, nature, sexuality, and the ways that political turmoil and social stagnation can manifest in human relationships is a drama of extraordinary tactility, and one of the great contemporary film debuts.
Criterion.comRead More »

Based on the novel by Antonio Di Benedetto written in 1956, on Don Diego de Zama, a Spanish officer of the seventeenth century settled in Asunción, who awaits his transfer to Buenos Aires. Read More »

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An incestuous love affair. Meme and Jeremias are the younger children in a typical bourgeois family. Their mother Lucia is the dominant force in the household, but her fixation on upholding the niceties of upper-middle-class life has prevented her from seeing what is going on under her roof. When the siblings’ older brother and his fiancee arrive home for their wedding, it seems inevitable that the concealment will be impossible to sustain. But equally, it becomes apparent that if Lucia were to find out about the affair, there would be catastrophic consequences.Read More »