Lola Di Tella

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.

Over several days and nights, an actor and an actress read the correspondence between Torcuato and Kamala, the film director's parents, he from Argentina, and she from India. The letters, encompassing the decades from the 50s to the 70s, refer to love and idealism, record world travels, talk about socialism and psychoanalysis, about pain and broken dreams. Their reading reveals a relationship between the actors, with similarities and differences. Meanwhile, with his own daughter, the director sets about solving the puzzle of the family memory, an intimate twentieth-century tale.

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).