Agustín Mendilaharzu

Two female producers are commissioned to create a short documentary for an exhibition dedicated to Rubén Santantonín, an elusive figure of the Argentine avant-garde who died very young, in the late 1960s. However, the client imposes one unexpected condition: the video must be made together with David Lamelas, Santantonín’s former collaborator and today an internationally recognized figure of conceptual art. At first, the plan seems clear and limited in scope: Lamelas, accompanied by a young film crew, gathers archival materials, documents the few surviving works, and interviews curators and major artists – such as Luis Felipe Noé and Marta Minujín – who, along with Santantonín and Lamelas, peopled the legendary scene at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella. Lamelas gradually realizes that reconstructing the story of his friend also means confronting a series of gaps and contradictions.

An enormous effort of narrative complexity made up of six independent, successive stories, connected by the same four actresses living very different experiences in very different universes…

An album of odd and humorous stories on small places exclusively dedicated to idleness, which are empty in winter and crowded in summer: the spa towns. Cities under water, luxury hotels, mermaids, sea animals, sand castles, people who worship water, praying for health.

A biography of Jorge Luis Borges working from an exhaustive review of the papers he left, the books he read, the places he went to. And with this, an attempt to decipher a very peculiar life: someone who lived like a hidden, underground warrior, whose cause was literature, literature conceived as a kingdom and as a landscape. If Cold War spies fought from their desks or from an uninhabited house to defend their half of the world, Borges strove from a library to elevate and broaden the territories of his own tribe: the people for whom the most important part of the universe is books, plots and words. This film is devoted to that secret pilgrim (to borrow from Le Carré, the king of all spies).

María Villar, Cleo Moguillansky and Alejo Moguillansky tried to read live -perhaps sing- a voiceover narrative in sync with the projection of a deleted scene of The Little Match Girl, between fiction, essay, exhumation, failure, and the time that goes by and is unforgiving.

X arrives in a small town and witnesses a violent act; Z takes the job of a dead manager and discovers that he had a notebook written in code and a map; H is hired to go down a river and investigate a series of mysterious monoliths built on the shore.

With the strange disappearance of Laura, two colleagues, her older boyfriend, Rafael, and Ezequiel, learn of their recent discoveries, which may help them locate her. However, the story is bigger and stranger than they could imagine.

Feminism, Victoria Benedictsson, Leandro N. Alem, the Radical Party in Argentina, suicide, stunts, Edgar Allan Poe, the complicated relationship between low-budget films with a political aim and the film industry, Robert Louis Stevenson, fiction, facts, greed, gold treasures left by the Jesuits in Argentina, the 19th Century vs. the contemporary and the search for truth and wisdom are the background for this portrait of a clash between a Swedish artist and an Argentine film director.

A comedy during confinement? Probably so. A portrait of a little girl and her family during confinement? Apparently so. An absurd, Beckettian musical shot during confinement? Exactly, yes.

Fatherland brings a rigorous structural approach to a site of monuments that is also a place of movement, criss-crossed daily by tourists and locals. The grounds are laid out like city blocks, with wide avenues branching onto laneways filled with elaborate mausoleums. The film does not attempt to tour the cemetery as one would on foot, however, but rather moves chronologically through the history enshrined there. A series of individuals are framed in static compositions as they read aloud excerpts from the writings of noteworthy Argentines interred within. (Some license has been taken, as the final resting places of certain figures represented - such as journalist Rodolfo Walsh, who was among the "disappeared" - remain unknown. The result is both poetic and political.) Beginning in the early 1800s, this history comprises civil war, battles with the country's native population, the conflict between the city and the provinces, and years of military dictatorship.

A monolith is the excuse for a journey to an obsession full of charms and, like every dream, also some disappointment.

The sad story of Andersen's little match girl; the fate of Balthazar, Bresson's donkey; the impossible love affair between a militant of the Red Army Faction and an Argentinean pianist; the adventures in Buenos Aires of Helmut Lachenmann, who is trying to stage an insane opera; the problems of Marie, Walter and their daughter, who are trying to survive on very little money…

A poet dies and another one, younger, feels an obligation to promote her work. She is joined by a team of women filmmakers. The film begins with this unusual triangle but, interestingly, it grows into something more complex and subtle than a traditional research project.

Three decades later, the San Juan Civic Center construction project is back on track and, as if nothing had happened, the bureaucratic machinery seems to be united with the cranes and the human force and the megalomaniac desire that such an undertaking supposes. There, in that interruption and that return to activity, in the pharaonic recovery of lost dreams and projects that suddenly come back to life –as if they were architectural zombies–, there Mariano Donoso sees a movie.

What do Eva Perón, Víctor Grippo, an American tourist and the Catamaran poet Arturo Basanta have in common? That all of them once passed through the Traslasierra valley and were also victims of the tuber that has obsessed with the inhabitants of Villa Dolores: the solanum tuberosum, better known as the potato.

The story of a young couple, from beginning to end, from the euphoria of falling in love until the final days blurred and dark, is realized with an analytical eye and investigative zeal. How and why two people fall in love? What now? How quickly will they get into a relationship? When a relationship ends, and when should it end? Peter and Sofia, with its simple story of love, they become reflections of all those who, at twenty-five years have been in love.

Situation 1: Mondongo, a duo of Argentinian artists, create a work inspired by The Art of colors, a treatise by Johannes Itten. Situation 2: A filmmaker begins a portrait of them.

In 1969 Argentine filmmaker Hugo Santiago directed Invasión, his opera prima, written by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and later settled in France. This film documents his return to Buenos Aires in 2013 to shoot his latest film, Le ciel du centaure.


Dealing with a series of increasingly absurd situations and relationships, recently separated yoga instructors Gustavo and Vanesa are finding it difficult to live apart. Their challenges include meddling mothers, amnesiac students, and burgeoning romances. Step by step, they find their way back to the practice.

In 1973 Hugo Santiago made Les Autres, his second feature film. The film was produced in Paris by a team composed mostly of Argentines, and written together with Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Even so, the film ends up representing France in the official competition at the Cannes festival in 1974. That premiere is a great scandal in which political reasons and film criticism are confused. In this brief introduction, Hugo gives us some clues to better understand his most unknown work, and suggests that after the controversy unleashed in Cannes his career changed forever.

On 9 July – Argentina’s Independence Day – Llinás sets off in Buenos Aires with his regular cameraman Agustín Mendilaharzu to re-record ‘Corsini interpreta a Blomberg y Maciel’, an album made in 1929 by lyricist Hector Pedro Blomberg and composer Enrique Maciel, as an ode to Juan Manuel de Rosas, leader of the Argentine Confederation.

Nothing went as planned: what seemed to be an original idea (taking an international fashion event to a small town in the Argentine Pampas) ended up as a mysterious affair, with a mannequin who seems to have vanished, and who insists on leaving small clues scattered across the immense plains. But nothing seems to be too strange for Commissioner Sirota and her particular method which, this time, includes a clairvoyant, a legendary detective arriving from Santa Rosa and some picturesque “peritas” who choose to work at night, swinging to the rhythm of Ska. In the middle, a disturbing question: Is it a police case they are dealing with, or is someone taking them (the police, the whole town, the Italians – all of us, perhaps) for a fool?

El Pampero records Chantal Akerman's visit to Argentina in 2005.