Ada Frontini

Close-up on a man who censored films during the last military dictatorship in Argentina, slightly inspired by the infamous Miguel Paulino Tato.

Between January 2019 and May 2020, Adriana Lestido undertook a journey, without company or assistance, through the Arctic Circle and the Svalbard Islands, a frigid and inhospitable region shared by Norway and Iceland. During those months, Argentine photography recorded, in all its splendor, a still unknown ecosystem.

A simple game can reveal secrets hidden for years.

It’s Christmas season. Ten years have passed since Lina traveled to Chile to work as a domestic worker away from her son who lives with her grandmother in Peru. Manuel, a former employer, ask her to supervise the construction of a swimming pool for his daughter Clara in his new house. In this half-inhabited space, Lina spends the day taking care of Clara, while at night, she has furtive sexual encounters with strangers that confront her with her deep solitude.

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.

The villagers of El Dorado, Argentina, shy away from doctors. Then again, they hardly need one. They have almost as many cures for ailments and illnesses as there are residents in the village. 65 year old Jorge can also cure the most dreaded ailment of them all, the much feared espanto.

A man works for the first time in his life thanks to the efforts of a neighbor, who has secret intentions.

The corner through which a bus that crosses Buenos Aires passes may suddenly be a corner that remains on the other side of the world. An old residential area of ​​the city, a few blocks from Barrancas de Belgrano, is transformed into something else. An arch marks the entrance: false imperial door, refuge for emigrants, tourist corridor, intersection of businesses, festivities and pedestrians, restaurants and supermarkets. What is Chinatown?