Event
Cine Independiente: Discoveries From Argentina Series Pass
Cine Independente: Discoveries From Argentina
APRIL 12 14, FRIDAY SUNDAY
A "new wave" in Argentine cinema crested, against all odds, during the country's deep economic crisis of the last decade. Directors such as Pablo Trapero, Lisandro Alonso, Lucrecia Martel, Santiago Loza, Anna Poliak, Adrian Caetano and Diego Lerman created daring works that plotted a new map of international independent filmmaking. The ambitious, government-sponsored Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival (BAFICI, as it is affectionately known among cinephiles) steadfastly cultivated and promoted native production, becoming a crucible for emerging talent.
The wave's inevitable ebb left a vacancy that is being contested by a new generation keen to redefine vernacular storytelling, from intimate documentaries to political thrillers, literary adaptations to hushed dramas. We are pleased to present a selection of works - five features, two shorts, and one love letter, most of them premieres - that reflects this nascent but fertile movement in Argentine cinema, yet again. Curated by Jay Kuehner.
Cine Independente: Discoveries From Argentina
Papirosen
Apr 12
(Gaston Solnicki, Argentina, 2011, Blu-ray, 74 min)
A home movie that subtly reconfigures the genre, Papirosen (named after the popular Yiddish song) mines Gaston Solnicki's decade-long chronicle of his well-off Buenos Aires family, revealing a portrait of present-day dysfunction while also conjuring the haunting weight of history. Four generations of this amicable and exasperating brood are brought to cinematic life by Solnicki's obsessive filming and forays into the archivefrom faded 8mm footage of arrival in the South American port to digital video in a South Florida parking lot. Through the alternation of past and present, memorial and incidental, Solnicki chips away at a forlorn essence of his family that, in spite of class privilege, can be traced to the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust. One can direct a film, but not a family (the director seems to be lamenting) and Papirosen uncovers heartbreak, deeply affecting but hardly sentimental, in the folds of the ordinary.
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Cine Independente: Discoveries From Argentina
El Estudiante/The Student
Apr 13
(Santiago Mitre, Argentina, 2011, Blu-ray, 110 min)
A political thriller of labyrinthine proportions and true Argentine blood, Santiago Mitre's El Estudiante features the emerging actor Esteban Lamothe as an ambitious university student who plunges irrevocably into an internecine world of campus activism, which in a post-Peronist and recession-addled Buenos Aires is as heated, ideological, and duplicitous as the revolutionary zeitgeist of the '60s. Lamothe's idealistic Roque is given an accelerated education in leadership when he falls for a radical instructor with unflappable conviction. The pace is brisk and the politics robust: a riposte to the ennui of its North American counterparts!
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Cine Independente: Discoveries From Argentina
Dioramas
Apr 13
(Gonzalo Castro, Argentina, 2012, Blu-ray, 79 min)
From the prolific and deeply independent Gonzalo Castro (who handles most every aspect of filming, along with running a publishing house devoted to books on cinema), Dioramas charts the demanding rehearsals of a small contemporary dance company (headed by choreographer Mario Pattin) in a visceral, vérité style: almost documentary-like in its observational modeas in Wiseman's portrait of the Paris Opera ballet, La Danseyet in a minor key devoid of any grand thematic agenda. Dioramas, per its title, sketches subtle tableaux of dance sequences unfolding in their own time, paralleled by the increasingly heated partnership shared by two of the female leads. Unrehearsed desire is contrasted with the rigors of process in this austere drama, its subtle lyricism uncoiling like the dancers themselves.
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Cine Independente: Discoveries From Argentina
Los Dias
Apr 14
(Ezequiel Yanco, Argentina, 2012, Blu-ray, 80 min)
Los dias is a confidently somber look at the daily life of two nine year-old twins, Martina and Micaela Mendes, growing up in Quilmes outside of Buenos Aires with their mother. Los dias is indeed about the days, anything but normal for these fast-growing girls, shuttling between school, church, auditions, household chores, preening in front of the mirror, and literally pulling each other's hair out, (alternately with and without their mother's supervision, whose job with a taxi company increasingly leaves the girls to fend for themselves). Intimate, unadorned, and candid, Los dias confirms director Yanco as mature beyond his years; the prestigious Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba) is screening the film this spring.
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Cine Independente: Discoveries From Argentina
Viola
Apr 14
(Matías Piñeiro, Argentina, 2012, Blu-ray, 65 min)
Matías Piñeiro continues (if not perfects) his reflexive and unconventional adaptations of Shakespeare by spinning Twelfth Night into an ever-refracting, playful, and sumptuous narrative game that unfolds in present-day Buenos Aires. Viola is unleashed in the capital city delivering packages of pirated media for her company, which she runs with her longtime boyfriend Javier. From this beginning Piñeiro spins a tale of chance meetings, intrigues, secrets and destiny-laden encounters with an all-girl theatre troupe mounting a production that assimilates fragments of the Bard's work. Formally rigorous while manifesting rather than merely illustrating Shakespearean tropes, Viola is evidence of the young Piñeiro's under-recognized genius and introduces a brave new generation of Argentine actors.
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LocationNorthwest Film Forum
1515 12th Ave
Seattle, WA 98122
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