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.