Starched Collars

Life is a gift, life grants you gifts, but everyone has, within him, the seed of his own downfall: his gold tooth. In the end comes tragedy: an everlasting toothache.

Marvin, an actor in cheap television commercials, is secretly in love with the beautiful Jenny and attributes his rejection to his very short stature. Depressed, he wanders through a park where a Harlequin encourages him to take control of his destiny with a magic pill.

A young artist is abandoned by his lover, who leaves her mattress as the only trace of her life with him. The mattress becomes an obsession.

A current of thought unites the three episodes in a coherent way, embodied with few elements, and that makes of space, time, and movement, purely cinematographic modes of expression. Voice is not needed. Yes there are sounds, music, but not human voices, as in primitive cinema. There are faces, slow or fast movements, despair, fatality, a barely glimpsed horror, desire and fear of freedom. There is also love, perhaps as an illusion, rather than as a reality.

A family, Mateo, Monica and eight year old Sofia, move into a house on the outskirts of Lima. From the first night, the girl is haunted by a terrifying being. These harassments become every time more violent and disturbing, and soon enough will require the presence of a priest, who will try to help without imagining the consequences.

This story tells how Ignacio Rodriguez, manager of a textile export company, lives so absorbed in his work that it creates personal crisis which leads to the hospital. After this episode his brother recommends visiting a spiritual guide, beginning a journey of learning that will take him to find the inner peace he needed.

A timid and sensitive man quits his 9-5 job to pursue his dream of becoming a watercolor painter. However, his neighbors and love will not agree with his new endeavor.

Silvia, a beautiful 45-year-old widow, is obsessed with having a child and finds in attractive but naive Mercedes the perfect candidate to bear it. Silvia kindly offers her a job and a room in her house, and then manipulates her into seducing a young man named Jaime. They soon fall in love and Mercedes becomes pregnant. Silvia will do anything in her power to keep the baby, even if it means leaving a couple of bodies behind.

When Adriana, the mother, becomes convinced that a perfect family consists of only two children, the arrival of a new baby, Tomas, turns their world upside down. Ignoring Tomas entirely, the family is plunged into a surreal struggle where every member must fight for their place.

It's 1943. Santiago, a young mathematician, travels through the Peruvian desert with an aging supporter of Nazi ideology and a driver with a sordid past. An unusual journey that will change his perspective on life.

Based on the story "Andare verso il popolo", by Alberto Moravia, this 17-minute satire is about a young upper-class city woman, who handles a totally mythologized discourse of the "good Indian" and the Andes, who come to the mountains to face a totally different reality.