Trenque Lauquen by Laura Citarella
By Alonso Aguilar
As a showcase of the most celebrated works of the year’s European and North American festival circuits, the New York Film Festival (NYFF) tends to be one of the quintessential barometers for the ongoing trends around the “arthouse world.” On its 2022 edition, the main slate programming boasts auteur highlights from Cannes, Berlin and Venice as the core of its roster, with a dedicated space for more eclectic works being featured in the Currents section, where all kinds of lengths, formats and geographies are grouped together by a shared sense of audiovisual inventiveness.
Bypassing the need of a competition, NYFF seems to embrace its role as a panopticon of the cinematic year, an exciting opportunity to see novel and diverse aesthetic propositions and the newest from brand-name filmmakers engage in a healthy dialogue that paints at least a partial picture of the year in moving images.
Latin America, for example, had a single film featured on the main slate with Laura Citarella’s 260-minute epic Trenque Lauquen, while seeing a considerably more robust representation on the different programs that made up the Currents section. More than any real indication of the region’s cinematographic output, what this showcases is the lack of a consensus “crossover hit” from the festival circuits. After all, by seeing the wide and diverse selection of Latin American films in the Currents section, it becomes clear that the region’s most exciting audiovisual voices have interests that go beyond the realm of the canonical.
Most of the films featured offer vastly different socio political contexts, aesthetic approximations and intentions, but if one were to group them all together, a common thread would be the exploratory relationship with the medium’s possibilities, a committed search for new forms that go beyond the preconceived notions of how art in the region should be.
Trenque Lauquen by Laura Citarella
The aforementioned ethos has been at the core of Argentina’s independent production collective El Pampero Cine, mostly known for Mariano Llinás’ grand, baroque narratives, and the idiosyncratic output of both Alejo Moguillansky and Citarella. In Trenque Lauquen, Citarella takes the intricate storytelling games of previous works like Ostende (2011) and Dog Lady / La mujer de los perros (2015) and expands them into a kaleidoscopic web of subplots and dramatis personae.
It all starts with the disappearance of a woman called Laura, and how two men that love her hit the road in search of her. Almost immediately, the enigmatic narrative starts diverging into a collection of digressions that include erotic discussions, meta-reflections on the nature of telling stories, and even a sci-fi subplot about a supernatural conspiracy. Through inspired plays with perspective and different point of views for the same actions, the film creates an enthralling atmosphere of tension and paranoia, amplified by the unnerving synth score and Citarella’s claustrophobic blocking and mise en scène. At the core of Trenque Lauquen is an engaging road movie exploring the place of female desire, and its depictions, throughout history, a solid foundation that progressively becomes more ambitious, turning into a full-blown Borgesian tale, where lyrical voice overs and operatic montages go well beyond the trappings of its elliptical mystery facade.
Perhaps the most acclaimed of the Latin American films that played at NYFF is Berlinale standout Dry Ground Burning / Mato seco em chamas, a collaborative effort between Brazilian director Adirley Queirós and Portuguese experimental filmmaker Joana Pimenta. From the outset, the names involved and the synopsis give a sense of cognitive dissonance, a subversion of both of these artists’ trajectory so far.
Dry Ground Burning by Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta
The question of how could a non-fiction take on a military police intervention on the peripheral city on the outskirts of Brasilia fit with Queirós’ impressionistic cyberpunk aesthetic and Pimenta’s textured light works and distorted landscapes is answered within Dry Ground Burning’ first couple minutes. Bikes going in circles around a fireplace, with a cacophonous symphony of industrial soundscapes immediately sets the tone for the film. Bypassing straightforward socio-political portrayal, Pimenta and Queirós create a hyperreal folk tale that mirrors the real-life experiences of a group of female gasoline pirates trying to survive by their own means on the margins of Brazilian society.
A particular focus on the intrinsic relationship between corporality, labor and leisure guides the film’s aesthetics, where the tension of bodies in flux and the power of close-ups carry the emotional weight by way of empathetic framing. Be it unhinged Brazilian funk dance offs, or the arduous process of operating heavy machinery, Dry Ground Burning is fully committed to forging its own stylistic resistance, one built on a palpable sense of humanity and anger.
The final Latin American feature part of New York Film Fest was another a Brazilian film dealing with an alternative existence during the times of Jair Bolsonaro’s infamous right-wing government in Gustavo Vinagre’s Three Tidy Tigers Tied a Tie Tighter / Três Tigres Tristes, albeit a completely different take than Dry Ground Burning. Vinagre’s film is unapologetically flamboyant, depicting a hyperpop version of the pandemic, where pastel colors and glittery vomit are an essential part of it.
In addition to Three Tidy Tigers Tied a Tie Tighter’s hyperkinetic style and playful integrations with social media motifs lies a harsher critique of Brazilian society. In this pandemic, amnesia became a central symptom. The scars of capitalist exploitation, dictatorship and colonialism are still fresh, but there’s no memory of the hurt they’ve done. Vinagre’s narrative almost seems like his own antidote to this gloomladen context, as it follow a charming trio of queer protagonists through a series of colorful vignettes around dystopian Sao Paulo, permeating with a sense of warm communal joy that outshines their surroundings.
Three Tidy Tigers Tied a Tie Tighter by Gustavo Vinagre
Beyond these three features, NYFF’s Currents programs offered an heterogeneous collection of short films from Latin American filmmakers, particularly emergent voices working within the realm of experimental cinema. Perhaps the most established of the bunch is Mexican director Nicolás Pereda, whose Flora exists as a spiritual follow-up, and even complementary piece, to his breakthrough feature Fauna (2020).
In its brief 11-minute runtime, Pereda reflects on Fauna’s meta-narrative and his interest in the representation of narco culture in Mexican media. Insightful ideas about the role of storytelling and popular mythmaking are expressed over a structuralist recontextualization of Fauna’s footage, cementing Pereda’s vision as one of the most exciting and idiosyncratic in the region.
Underground Rivers / Los mayores ríos se deslizan bajo tierra and Aribada are the two Colombian works part of Currents. Both of them depict rural areas of the country, but their intentions and focus are worlds apart. In the former, Simón Vélez plays with textural tensions between digital recordings and analogue film, and how they relate to the erratic environment from which the stoic protagonist seems to take shelter. A dissonant synth gives the whole endeavor an oneiric feel that’s amplified by the film’s elliptic and free flowing structure. The observation of class contrasts amidst Underground Rivers’ loose dramatic core is present, but doesn’t seem to be the aim of the film, as Medellín exists more as an abstracted and almost primal force guiding the rituals of everyday life.
Flora by Nicolás Pereda
Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau and Natalia Escobar’s Aribada, on the other hand, fully immerses itself on the milieu of indigenous tradition in Colombia's coffee region. The film plays with ritual iconography, distorted electronics and a focus on stylized performance to establish a world akin to a folk tale, where autochthonous myth and a transfuturist queer community intertwine in this look at the subversion of Western signifiers.
Alexandra Cuesta’s Lungta and Pablo Mazzolo’s The Newest Olds round off the Latin American participation at this year’s NYFF with two experimental works exploring the possibilities of aural and textural reinterpretation. Lungta, for example, is a progressive evolution of raw elements, particularly light and shadows, into an expressionistic tableaux. As the dissonant sound design, strobe effects and screen drawings collide against each other, the motions start approximating early cinema frame rates, drawing the viewer closer to a figurative representation of what they could be projecting, before finally letting the frame collapse in an almost visceral climax.
The Newest Olds is also centered on a formal study of light and landscape, but Mazzolo’s sensory exploration forgoes abstraction in favor of a strong link with the Windsor-Detroit region’s urban environment. Superimpositions and sonic overlapping give new meaning to the city, removing it from its foundations, and creating a purer portrait that goes beyond the political and physical constraints of modernity.
Spanning multiple geographies, sociocultural contexts and stylistic explorations, these eight films are not only a reminder of Latin America’s rich output and imaginative voices, but also that there’s no one true “Latin American Cinema”, only a collection of contrasting audiovisual impressions dialoguing with each other.
______________
Alonso Aguilar is a cultural journalist from San José, Costa Rica. He does editorial labor in Krinégrafo: Cine y Crítica and his writings have featured in Mubi Notebook, Bandcamp Daily, Film International, photogénie, Cinema Year Zero, Costa Rica Festival Internacional de Cine, La Nación and Revista Correspondencias.
