The Endless Film

In the 90s, members of the Wichí community of Gral. Mosconi, northeast of the province of Salta, searched for evidence and prepared the necessary arguments to face a judicial dispute that required them to demonstrate with evidence the possession and ownership of their property. territory. Indian Path is built from filming and testimonies generated at that time by the community itself, which introduce us to that complex process where, beyond the legal, the Wichí of Misión Tolaba put into play the ancestral notions of belonging to nature that give life and sustenance to mountain civilizations.

In his second feature film, Leandro Listorti establishes a parallel between two worlds he seems to know well: that of plants and that of cinema. This delicate cinematographic work, full of beautiful images—both archival and current—gives an account of the immense work of classification and preservation, and generously invites us to think about forms of representation and memory.

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.

This fully archival journey through the 35 years of Alfredo Stroessner’s regime in Paraguay reveals unseen footage and explores one of the longest-running dictatorships in history, whose effects still resonate today.

Mountakha is a Senegalese immigrant who has just arrived in Buenos Aires. In Dakar he was a truck driver. While trying to get that job in this new city, he does some temporary jobs. Mountakha wonders if he can be a good salesman, or if his destiny is tied to acting. Some of his new friends have a particular bond with the cinema.

The film does not describe, rather it observes, in a distant manner, the world of Martin, a seventeen year old who feels he doesn’t belong anywhere, not at home, school, nor with his friends or members of his rock band. In search of some happiness, Martin takes off to the coastal town of Mar de Plata, where his older brother lives. Unglamorous, yet enchantingly addictive and refreshingly genuine, Acuña paints a confused and uncomfortable world, and makes us want revisit it over and over again.

A young man becomes obsessed with a gardening student who is about to leave for Switzerland.

A film of and through the trees. Leaves catch, consume and resist the light through the seasons.

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.

Set in Santa Victoria, Argentina, this 2SLGBTQ+ supernatural docu-drama tells the story of a Wichí community facing displacement, along with their efforts of retaliation, at the hands of a negligent government’s plan for urbanization.

Albertina Carri wants to make a film about Isidro Velázquez, an almost mythical outlaw figure from northern Argentina who was shot dead by police in 1967. She’s not the only one interested in him: her sociologist father Roberto Carri wrote a book on him called “Pre-Revolutionary Forms of Violence” and a film was made about his story, although both father and film disappeared during the Dirty War. Legends, families, political alignments, cinema: none offer a stable foothold and Carri’s passage through them is like wandering a garden of forking paths, only to arrive at a landscape of cracked earth and thorns.

As a young woman, Diana Bellessi wanted to travel. When few women walked the road alone, she hitchhiked the continent. A poet searching for the lands promised by her childhood books. Over time, she discovered that going somewhere very close could be as intense an adventure as those trips. The secret garden accompanies the poet on the journey that she makes every end of the year, from Buenos Aires to an island in Paraná. There, surrounded by the nature of the delta - in that place where the garden of the house merges with the mountain - is the place where she writes. "Writing is also a vertigo - she says while, with buckets, she removes the mud left by the flood -. But the beautiful thing is to have the vertigo and the return. Writing pushed me far and out, and brought me back."

Nicolás Barsoff, a young Argentine actor of Austrian and Russian descent, rescues a box of film reels just as his father was about to throw it away. He hopes the box will be the key to unlocking a tendency toward darkness that haunts him as part of an inevitable inheritance he tries to combat with natural medicines. Through the archive, we delve into the story of a family torn apart by World Wars I and II, immigration to Argentina, and the military dictatorship of 1976. His two grandparents are presented as antagonistic characters in the context of the disappearance: two ghostly figures in a genealogy that Nicolás will try to reconstruct.

Documentary about the Argentine poet, born in San Juan, Jorge Leonidas Escudero. His voice -speaking and reading- is the thread that brings together the experience as a gold digger in the San Juan mountains, the enthusiasm for games of chance, poetry, nature. The player loses, however he insists. Poems, friendship and humor remain, the celebration of the spoken word.

A moving discovery is made while walking through the streets of Paris. Part documentary, part loaned archive, but completely a declaration of love.