Chantal Akerman, an autobiography

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.


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.

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.

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…

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?

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.

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.

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 policeman relates an old case. A young widow, an insomniac businessman, a horse forgotten in a stable. The city as the scene of a trap.

A filmmaker fails to portray an artist couple. Between music, painting and cinema, he achieves, however, an exceptional comedy of colours. Work inspired by the book "Kunst der Farbe" by Johannes Itten.

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.

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…

Mariano, 16, inexplicably and without warning, shoots himself twice and improbably survives. Then, life goes on. His brother pursues a romance with a girl working at a fast-food joint, his mother takes off on a trip with a stranger, and Mariano recruits a woman to join his medieval wind ensemble.

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.

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.

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.