Tanya Valette

A voice that claims to be from a hippopotamus. A voice that doesn’t understand the perception of time. Pepe, the first and last hippo killed in the Americas, tells his story with the overwhelming orality of these towns.

Rafael, an old butler of a decadent farmhouse, lives with his landlord in that space. He develops a series of actions and daily routines that resume a life and a glorious family past. These actions and gestures will become the only way of sustaining that home and those lives humbled in memory. With the decline of that environment, Rafael will be underdog of his place and his own story, and will be forced to leave in an uncertain trip, towards the last of his possessions.

In 1997 the Argentine filmmaker Fernando Birri returned to his home country to film a documentary on the 30th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara and the relevance of utopias at that time. Carmen Guarini decided to record those moments. A rough edit of this film was hidden away on a fragile VHS tape for twenty years. Today, these images come to life and shed some light on the life of this Latin American poet and master filmmaker, who, at the age of 92, still refused to give up on his own utopias.