Film at Lincoln Center announced today the main slate lineup for the 60th edition of the New York Film Festival, which includes the Argentine film Trenque Lauquen by Laura Citarella as the only Latin American entry.
The 250-minute film, told in 12 chapters and to be presented in two parts, will have its world premiere in the Orizzonti competition at the Venice Film Festival this September. In her dazzling and enormously pleasurable new opus, director Citarella takes the viewer on a limitless, mercurial journey through stories nested within stories set in and around the Argentinean city of Trenque Lauquen (“Round Lake”) and centered on the strange disappearance of a local academic named Laura (Laura Paredes).
Through initial inquiries by two colleagues—older boyfriend Rafael and a driver named Ezequiel with whom she had grown secretly close—we learn about her recent discoveries, including a new, unclassified species of flower and a series of old love letters hidden at the local library, which may help them track her down. Yet as flashbacks and anecdotes pile up, we—and the film’s intrepid investigators—begin to realize that this intricately structured tale is larger and stranger than we could have imagined.
Citarella, a producer of the equally remarkable shape-shifting epic La Flor, has confidently crafted a series of interlocked romantic, biological, and ecological mysteries that create parallels between past lives and present dangers, invoke the rapture of obsessive pursuit, and salute the human need to find personal freedom and happiness.
