The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the U.S. theatrical run of the Argentinean documentary Papirosen by Gastón Solnicki. The film, a Film Movement release, opens for a week on January 24 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center with the filmmaker in attendance at select screenings.
Masterfully edited from nearly 200 hours of footage, Papirosen represents a decade of filmmaking, and four generations of Argentine director Solnicki's family history, culled from 8mm home videos, a VHS bar mitzvah, and original observational material. His father, Victor, emerges as the lead figure, but Solnicki highlights the entire clan. Beginning with the birth of his nephew, Mateo, and punctuated throughout by interviews with his grandmother, Pola, a Holocaust survivor, the film's scope is simultaneously epic and intimate. Papirosen is a meditation on family, history, the importance of storytelling, and the power of cinema itself.
The Argentinean film, and official selection at the Locarno, Rotterdam and New York Jewish film festivals 2012 as well as a Cinema Tropical Awards nominee for Best Documentary, has been hailed as "a unique work of historiography, equivocally concerned with the wages of the past and the vicissitudes of the present" (Jay Kuehner, Cinemascope).
