Event

Papirosen

Cine Independente: Discoveries From Argentina

Apr 12

(Gaston Solnicki, Argentina, 2011, Blu-ray, 74 min)

Friday, Apr 12 at 08:00PM

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.