At first the sugar cane field looks like a huge green wall, a wall that will take the workers days to overcome. The sugar cane cutters begin their day by sharpening their machetes before they start to work. Blow by blow. The camera keeps its distance as it observes their smooth movements. Soon every sense of time is lost, the sugar cane cutters’ rhythmic movements develop their own choreography, and time seems to expand. The more sugar cane they cut the brighter the screen. The sky, the hill and the green landscape surrounding the field emerge.
This flow is interrupted by a black screen like the end of a reel. Then the process begins again. The rhythm of the machetes and the workers’ steps on the dry leaves merge with the conceptual music of this film. Felipe Guerrero refrains from any sociological discourse about the cutters’ situation and working conditions. It’s the abstraction that brings out the exploitative element of this archaic labour all the more clearly.

– Paulo de Carvalho

Never underestimate the power of the dark side.

It all started ten years ago when he filmed the birth of his nephew Mateo. Since then, Gastón Solnicki has taken his camera to all family reunions – whether it’s everyday meetings, a family vacation or a high Jewish holiday. The film revolves around his father Victor, the patriarch who earned the wealth of this newly rich Argentine middle class family and now, at old age, is forced to watch his daughter’s marriage fail and his family’s social status crumble.
The familiarity makes a protagonist of Solnicki’s camera and allows the audience to experience moments of intimacy as intensely as arguments and family crises. In this complex and unadorned portrait of his family, the director also narrates a story of flight, a new start and rise in society. Gastón Solnicki cleverly combines his own material with old Super 8 and video material from the family archive and transcends the genre of the home movie in a gripping family epic encompassing four generations, overshadowed by the Holocaust even today.

– Paulo de Carvalho

A man on his usual trip to work, immersed in a system in which the use of people as objects is part of everyday life.

Ernestina – the residents enjoy the pleasant sound of the name of their small town near Buenos Aires. Their Ernestina seems like a pearl of tranquillity. But the oldest town in the district is also the most deserted. Ernestina is shrinking, almost no one is left but the elderly, and they seem to have one foot in the past and one in the present day. Nobody can or wants to imagine tomorrow.
Things are seething under the idyllic surface. Many institutions have been vandalised. It was the river people, everyone agrees. As for the rest, every resident has their own interpretation of the strange goings-on in Ernestina. There’s been a security guard with a baseball cap and gun watching over the nocturnal calm lately. Where did he come from? No one knows for sure. And yet he has become the lonely defender of the main square against the phantoms from the river – and the wind. You can literally read the story of the place in the faces of the interviewees in this film. Each one represents an aspect of the Ernestina of the past: the shop, the church, the theatre, the camping ground, or the hotel, whose beautiful tiled floor recalls its former heyday. Their stories combine to create the atmospheric picture of a place where the clocks were stopped to make way for a multitude of realities. The setting of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez might look like Ernestina.
– Lars Meyer