Conversations in a veterinarian’s waiting room: Liza, director Macarena Albalustri’s over-ten-year-old cat, doesn’t eat any more. The imminent death of a beloved pet evokes memories of another loss, that of her mother, who died ten years ago and whom Albalustri hardly remembers. As she is coping with the grief over her cat, buried feelings and questions are uncovered again, an emotional search begins. Using photos, letters and objects from her childhood, the director tries to re-awaken memories – in herself and in others. She talks to persons who were close to her mother, to the latter’s friends and her father. She even manages to find the psychotherapist consulted by her mother at the time. The conversations are always about coping with loss, dying and one’s own death. It’s a very intimate film essay about saying farewell, about developing rituals and personal forms of mourning which everyone has to find and invent for themselves to deal with the pain of farewell.

Frederik Lang

A historic Argentinean event, the bombing of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires by the military in a coup d’état on 16 June 1955, is haunting a filmmaker’s nightmares, though he was only born in 1978. As if the ghosts of national history had recruited him, who never saw a war in his life: as a medium to work through this trauma. He and some colleagues initiate a project of audiovisual basic research. How can one translate and communicate the experience of war at all? Or, in other words: is history a stream or a pile? The film discourse of “Project 55” seems like the slow fabrication of thoughts by talking or filming. And if this reminds anyone of Heinrich von Kleist it’s neither coincidental nor intentional but inevitable. The journey of this film goes from Buenos Aires via Vietnam and nuclear arms tests back to family history – or rather that part of history that is yet to be written by future generations.

Sounds rather cerebral? Certainly! But whoever started the rumour that films should be made from the hip? There is some sense in every sensuality – and not just in the words.

Ralph Eue

“I think it’s the first time that I don’t march with your mom”, 15-year-old Vicente’s father tells him in the car. The rally for the victims of the last Argentine military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 is Vicente’s initiation instead. And this is how Francisco Novick films the loud protest in the streets of Buenos Aires: as a pathetic and touching ritual.

Carolin Weidner

Centaurs are mythical creatures. Half human, half horse. Gauchos resemble centaurs. Like the latter, they are a practically extinct species. Nor is there much left of their culture of nomadic cattle breeding. But there are still some survivors of the species left, especially in the north of Argentina.

Gauchos don’t do much. Nor do they talk much. They are! In the most intense fashion. Director Nicolás Torchinsky portrays an old couple’s companionship and conflicts. Which means that we, too, for the length of a film participate in this way of being in a world that seems to have been forgotten by time. We watch them like a nocturnal fire that will slowly die away in the morning if it’s not fed. Above the fire: the constellation of the Centaur, a prominent constellation in the southern sky. If it was up to the stars, the gaucho would surely still be a mythical hero. But in this world things aren’t up to the stars but to the will of people or, even more prosaic, to circumstances – and circumstances won’t have it so.

Ralph Eue