Everyday observations from Buenos Aires, shot on black-and-white 16mm film material, alternate with twenty-year-old Hi8 colour shots from New York. The perspective of a father who collects memories for his daughters. The perspective of a son who records his father’s reminiscences. Richard Shpuntoff’s multi-layered montage film is a clever essay on cultural identities, on cities and languages.

When we watch a subtitled film, we look, listen and read at the same time. We assume that the three levels are congruent or at least add up to form a whole. “Even the best subtitles suck”, the subtitles of this film announce, however, because “You are still reading instead of looking at the images.” Translating means rewriting. Therefore, “Everything That Is Forgotten in an Instant” tells parallel stories in images, words and writing: of urban development and power structures in two distant metropolises, of identity and its transgenerational transfer, of three continents and three languages which draw equally dividing and connecting lines through a family. The insecurity caused by the discrepancy between the filmic elements turns into a school of selective perception. Images, languages and texts are no dictate, after all: They leave us a choice.

When Mizu discovers a small plant in the forest, she goes there every day to water it. The years pass by, the little seedling becomes a big tree, Mizu a big girl, and one day they are both grown-up. But then a big rain comes that seems to go on forever. When the forest is flooded, Mizu must save herself. She takes refuge in her tree.

A poet’s life ends and a film begins to carry on her legacy, prosaically at first. When Juana Bignozzi dies in 2015, the intellectual property rights to her work pass to the young author Mercedes Halfon – as the aged lady had decreed. But Mercedes also inherits a refrigerator and a lot of junk that must be cleared out of the orphaned apartment in Buenos Aires. Together with young filmmakers, she transforms the duty into a poetically fulfilling project.

The result is not only an unusual but actually a non-portrait of a poet – and perhaps not even a result. Rather, it is a continuously growing equation of superimposed faces, texts and images that refuses to simply work out. They look at each other as if in rear-view mirrors: Juana Bignozzi, who speaks to the young from her writings full of humble reverence, and her young female admirers who, reading, filming and browsing through Bignozzi’s legacy, feel almost embarrassed by these declarations of love. What confidence the deceased had in them! What tremendous expectations she had of those whose mother or grandmother she could have been! Their own poetic achievements seem too half-hearted to Mercedes and Laura to ever live up to such advance praise. But even as they doubt, they are already deep into it.

A human tragedy on the backdrop of a legal and medical scandal which in 2007 lead to legal action against the Argentinean state before the UN Human Rights Commission and a verdict of guilty in 2011. The mentally and physically handicapped 16-year-old girl Laura had been raped by her uncle in 2006. But a legal abortion which had already been officially granted at the request of her mother, Vicenta, was opposed by lawyers and doctors.

“Vicenta” conveys the details of this truly incredible imposition in the form of a fable in which plasticine figures seem rooted to the spot in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Only the camera moves through this scenery, usually in travellings across the set-up. Very occasionally excerpts of newscasts, broadcast from small monitors on the stage of this “puppet show”, authenticate the narrative. And yet the whole spectrum of conceivable feelings between being openly paralysed with shock and proud self-empowerment of the mother who stubbornly fights for justice for herself and her daughter is conveyed and made comprehensible. In the above-mentioned UN ruling, the Argentinean state was accused of having fundamentally disregarded the recognised right to freedom from inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment in the case of Laura and her mother Vicenta.