Donde cae el sol

The Bus Station

Bathed in the half-light, a bus station north of Cordoba in Argentina. Waiting, and the arrivals and departures of the local buses punctuate the lives of these workers and travellers. Far from making an observational documentary, Gustavo Fontán crafts the ghostly portrait of a place of transit where the traces of those who bring it alive resonate and are muffled, blending mystery with everyday life.

Intervened Events

The omnibus feature SUCESOS INTERVENIDOS consists of shorts by a who’s who of Argentine documentary and experimental-film giants, including Edgardo Cozarinsky and Gustavo Fontán but also Claudio Caldini, Andrés Di Tella and Gabriela Golder. Each one of them created a piece of a few minutes in length using archival footage from SUCESOS ARGENTINOS (“Argentine Events”), a popular newsreel series from 1938 to 1972 whose episodes have recently begun to be digitized by Buenos Aires’s “Pablo C. Ducrós Hicken” Film Museum.

The Face

A man in a small boat reaches an island on the Paraná River. He heads towards a site where there used to be a house or small village. Now there is nothing. Slight signs of something old and lost: the place where he was born. His presence allows the things in the abandoned spot to materialize: huts and tables, animals and canoes. Soon others arrive on the island: his wife, father, friends, and children. This is a meeting of the Man and his loved ones. With the dead, the birds, the river's music and his pain.

The Debt

Mónica did not make a client's payments of the office where she works. The missing 15K pesos not only commit her but also a colleague, who is the one who discovers the fault. It seems that is not the first time that this happens, but the colleague, despite his anger, kept silence and chose to believe her again: Mónica commits to replenish the sum of money the next morning.

The Shore That Falls

La orilla que se Abisma is conceived as a journey, a trip along a river. Like rivers, like all journeys, the film has meanders, small riverbeds, detours and moments of rest.

Historias Breves II: Abrigo

Ana loses her mother after a sudden heart attack. He tries to avoid his feelings by feigning indifference. He doesn't stop doing anything he always did, until a message, left by his mother in a radio message box before she died, is accidentally deleted. Ana is forced to face reality.

Construcción de una ciudad

The story of the rebirth of Federación, Argentina that in 1974 was flooded by the waters of the Uruguay River and subsequently destroyed by the government to be relocated and rebuild, told by its characters.

The Southern Cross

Nora and Javier have been hired to transport a shipment of cocaine in an ambulance. With the help of Wendy, Javier's transvestite brother, they rob a part of the shipment and escape from the police. Moulded by loneliness, indifference and a lack of communication, Nora, Javier and Wendy are three youths with no future who move on the outer rim of society and are helpless in the face of a corrupt power. They hide in El Marquesado, a seaside resort built by the military on dynamited cliffs where Rodolfo and Mercedes, Javier and Wendy's parents, survive by rustling pigs and cows from neighbouring farms. The conflicts and tensions in this marginal family resurface as they are reunited in this remote place with a sinister past.

La fe del volcán

Ani, an apprentice hairdresser who loses her job meets Danilo, a forty-something street scissors sharpener.

Germania

A German family unravels as they are forced to abandon their farm in Entre Ríos, Argentina.

Fatherland

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.

April elegy

The poet Salvador Merlino didn’t live to see published April’s elegy, his last book, as he died when it was still in the printing press. His daughter Mary (72) and his son, Carlos (74), kept the parcels of copies of their father’s book stashed away for 50 years, high up, on top of a wardrobe. The curiosity of young Federico will force them to come face to face with themselves.

The Regal Lemon Tree

A family gets together for New year. Three sisters and their families who live by the river. One of them does not attend because she is still in mourning. Her sisters and her nieces try to convince her but she remains firm in her refusal.

La madre

Sonia (45) and Jonatan (18), mother and son, share the house: a place for the mother's grief, a place for the son to escape. The husband is absent, gone, and attempts to find him lead nowhere. The son will leave at any moment. Anguish clouds the hours, shapes the mother's perception. Sonia drinks, gets drunk, tells strange dreams, and commits dangerous acts. Jonatan feels responsible. He takes care of her. If the episodes continue, if the mother becomes increasingly fragile and vulnerable, will the son be able to leave?

El árbol

An elderly couple debates whether to cut down an ancient acacia tree that has witnessed the major memories of our lives.

Los ríos

A man knocks on my door. I ask him what he needs. He doesn't answer. He looks at me for a few moments, with enormous eyes. He looks at me as one looks at an apparition. Rivers are born in that silence, in those hallucinated eyes, and they unfold a memory of water, a fragmented knowledge of tornadoes and banks, of creaking trees, of birds bathing in the rain, of men lost on some island, of drowning in the backwaters, of the splash of oars, of the shadow where the river narrows. A man knocks on my door. He says to me: You're not here, we're not here.