Apuntes desde el encierro

Winter 2007. Two artists from Argentina receive a grant to develop their work in Montreal (Canada). The only catch? They have to share an apartment. In this way filmmaker Franca González and cartoonist Ricardo Siri Liniers come to know each other. From the moment González becomes the roommate of Liniers, a friendship emerges between them and she makes him the proposal of doing a documentary about him. The film starts with an argument to get Liniers permission to chase him with videocameras and ends up becoming one of the most tender portraits ever done of the artist, reflecting the transcendence that ensues from the simple line of his drawings.

Documentary that chronicles daily life at Maison Michel Sarrazin, a palliative care home in Quebec where different patients spend their final days. Men and women facing death try to reclaim the dignity that illness has taken from them. The camera accompanies those intimate, everyday moments where life and death brush against each other: a caress, a conversation, a shared silence between those who care and those who say goodbye.

In Tolhuin, a small town lost in the extreme south of Argentina where almost nobody goes to stay, where the cold and the wind enter through all the cracks and the snow covers the fences, a man tries to prevent people from leaving through a new I try, a carnival in the middle of winter. This is a film about the efforts that man makes to adapt to a non-chosen destiny, to a territory that is hostile to him and that confronts him with nature in its purest and unbridled state.

Stan Hunt is a red cedar carver. He learned this art thanks to his father and grandfather, master sculptors from the Kwakiutl people, a group of forgotten villages in the north of Vancouver Island, near the Gulf of Alaska. Stan works on the most momentous piece of his life. A totem of 14 meters. A cedar that took 1,500 years to weigh more than 5 tons.

In the north of the pampas, the remains of a population lie hidden under the soil; they’ve been this way for more than a century. Their casual discovery is the starting point with which the film tries to puzzle out that mystery. There where soy reigns, one more battle is fought in the constant struggle of film against oblivion.

Between poetic observation and cinematographic portrait, this film delves into the universe of the sculptor Leo Vinci. At 92 years old, Leo plays at creating and transmuting the sacrifice of daily work into the sacred office of transforming the world with his hands.

The year 2023 marks the 35th anniversary of the association La Mujer y el Cine, and 43 female directors have come together to deliver a fragment of their gaze, a frame, an aesthetic and ethical decision, a tribute to women who anticipated the struggle. A leap into the void made by women filmmakers of different ages and backgrounds. United, in a sort of electronic loom, as an offering and a legacy in which a moment in the history of Argentine cinema is told, where we were all one, with our eyes on the past, our gaze on the present and the horizon full of the future.