Saturn or a Brief Treatise on Melancholy

With never-before-seen images and interviews, this documentary explores the life of Quino, one of Argentina's most important humorists.

In July 2002, an American Producer comissions director Mariano Donoso a documentary on the state of Education in San Juan, the province where he was born. On the first day of filming, a teachers’ strike begins, paralyzing classes in the whole province, and – indirectly – the film itself. Donoso consequently embarks on an odyssey (which is sometimes funny and sometimes sad), through the past and present of his homeland. Stikes, claims, Sarmiento, the earthquake, the province’s bureocracy and its relationship with Buenos Aires, and finally, the desert, await for Donoso in his venturesome journey.

A teacher with a blank notebook -the great Liliana Bodoc- arrives at a school in the middle of the desert behind the trail of the Huarpes. As in her books, Bodoc speaks to the children frankly about important things—water, the wind, death. Although, rather than speaking to them, she asks them—she looks into their stories and invites them to give shape to their ideas. But Lagunas is not exactly a documentary about Liliana Bodoc; it’s about lots of things—about the ghosts that inhabit a territory, about the bridges between generations, about memory. In Lagunas there are curious children, there are teachers and shamans, there are bodies buried in the sand, there is a culture and a language that refuse to become extinct. There is a filmmaker who, as he records, asks himself about his memories and about the memories he is leaving to his children. And there is also a writer who proves that in order to write, first you have to know how to listen.

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.

There was once, in 1910, a train able to cross the wild territories between Argentina and Chile, making possible a mythical journey, joining two oceans with a single ticket, from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso. The last trip of the BAP was in 1979; in the nineties, its various branches were permanently abandoned. Since then, travelers have been inhabiting the railway landscape as they dream, desire, remember or yearn: as part of their own being and national history.

In a warehouse, the remains of an abandoned mural are found. A broken mirror of collective memory, a puzzle to be reconstructed so that the university and society can recover their history. Because nothing is ever completely erased or rebuilt, but it does become transparent when the "Notes of Memory" are recovered. Thus, the fragments of political participation and repression at UNCuyo in the 1970s are united.