Siesta de verano

“This is a film about the end of a friendship. It wasn’t meant to be. Fifteen years ago, they painted my portrait.” (Mariano Llinás)

A biography of Jorge Luis Borges working from an exhaustive review of the papers he left, the books he read, the places he went to. And with this, an attempt to decipher a very peculiar life: someone who lived like a hidden, underground warrior, whose cause was literature, literature conceived as a kingdom and as a landscape. If Cold War spies fought from their desks or from an uninhabited house to defend their half of the world, Borges strove from a library to elevate and broaden the territories of his own tribe: the people for whom the most important part of the universe is books, plots and words. This film is devoted to that secret pilgrim (to borrow from Le Carré, the king of all spies).

A film about surviving something that didn’t go as expected. Manuel is going through a break-up with Camila, and, at the same time, he has to rethink the whole artistic project that has been his focus for the last few years. To give Camila space to pack, he leaves for a seaside location, where he continues his preoccupation with recording sounds of all kinds. His inertia about the future will be challenged by something extraordinary that happens to him on the beach.

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?

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.

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.

The second installment of the adventures of the Corsini Commando takes us this time to the Pampas plain, where Corsini grew up and forged a vision of the world that would accompany him throughout his life. The result of this excursion is an erratic wandering through the landscapes of the Homeland, its paradoxes and its ghosts: A land dreamed of by a newly arrived foreigner who imagined for himself a gaucho destiny that would never become completely real. Now then: is that not, in the end, the destiny of all things?

On 9 July – Argentina’s Independence Day – Llinás sets off in Buenos Aires with his regular cameraman Agustín Mendilaharzu to re-record ‘Corsini interpreta a Blomberg y Maciel’, an album made in 1929 by lyricist Hector Pedro Blomberg and composer Enrique Maciel, as an ode to Juan Manuel de Rosas, leader of the Argentine Confederation.

Is this film about Clorindo Testa or not? Is it about the life of the director, about the life of his father, about the life of his country, or is it just one of those biographical films that proliferate at film festivals in which the narrator spends his time recounting family anecdotes and pulling old photos out of a box? This small, microscopic adventure, whose subtitle, stolen from the Savoyard Xavier de Maistre, could well be Voyage autour de mon père, navigates between these threats and others even worse.

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.

For the unique 2x25 project, the festival asked 25 composers to compose a short piece of music, after which 25 filmmakers made a short film. A short film by Laura Citarella with music by Eiko Ishibashi.

Everyone is locked up, but Clementina and the man she's quarantined with won't stop working. We know little about him, and even less about her: we just see over and over again her mysterious face, which seems to defy everything.

Isolated in his apartment, old and forgotten by almost everyone —whom, in turn, he has also forgotten— Rafael occupies the hours of his daily life with various rituals and repetitions.

Manuel Jiménez receives some clandestine wiretappings that he has to transcribe. Because of this, and almost without wanting to, he enters a kaleidoscopic plot that involves a group of people at a party, their later walkabouts around the city at night, and their relationship with the secrets hidden inside Vodka’s diary.

Trenque Lauquen's Ezequiel believes he is keeping on searching for Laura in the Argentine pampas, but the landscape confuses and disorients him, becoming increasingly jagged and disconnected: a radio that cannot definitively tune into a station. Editing cuts swallow up her world, bringing to the surface an archipelago of cinematic universes (from L’avventura to Stromboli and La terra trema), and they generate a fata morgana, capable of shortening distances between pampas and Mediterranean landscapes, between real and fictional vision, between the adult’s disorientation and the childhood’s innate and hilarious wisdom. Cinema as the art of disappearance that always leaves a trace, yet another indelible trace of one of the most important contemporary filmmakers.