Three Argentine films will be screening as part of Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look festival, the annual showcase for adventurous new cinema, which in its 2023 edition will introduce New York audiences to more than two dozen works hailing from nearly as many countries.
The selected titles from the South American country are the feature films Herbaria by Leandro Listorti and A Little Love Package by Gastón Solnicki, and the short film Maid by Lucrecia Martel.
Listorti’s gorgeously collaged film, shot on both 16mm and 35mm, invites viewers into the delicate work of preserving plants and celluloid, both of which are under threat of extinction and require practices of collection, inspection, and archiving. In rhythmically interweaving the performances of this work in both fields, the film gives us an almost tactile experience of Argentina as a place—its subtropical climate as well as its colonized past. Archival nature films play against celluloid images that have become inhabited by a fungus. The layered and ultimately harmonious stories in Herbaria are testament to Listorti’s background as filmmaker, projectionist, and archivist. Herbaria won the Special Jury Award in the Burning Lights Competition at Visions du Réel, where it made its world premiere.
The singular Argentine filmmaker Solnicki (Kékszakállú) returns with this richly strange cabinet of curiosities, at once a tribute to the fading grandeur of old Vienna and a cryptic poem on the themes of modern rootlessness and the malaise of the monied classes. Greek actress Papoulia, best known for her bravura performances for Yorgos Lanthimos, here plays a version of herself alongside Chaplin (granddaughter of Charlie), as the two stroll the eerily empty city in search of the perfect antique apartment for the former and her family. Struck with an unplaceable sense of melancholy, Papoulia comes away unsatisfied with every beautifully appointed room they visit, a circumstance endured by Carmen with increasing exasperation. Governed by a musical logic, Solnicki’s film is a sensual and synesthetic delight that culminates in one of current cinema’s most eloquent needle drops.
And the latest work from master director Martel is an exquisitely ambiguous class encounter palindrome in which a woman’s training in hospitality keeps getting derailed by calls from home and other impulses.
Additionally, First Look will also the New York premiere of A Common Sequence by Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser, which transports the audience from the banks of a dying lake in Pátzcuaro, Mexico, to the apple orchards of Prosser, Washington, to the lands of the Cheyenne River Sioux. This singular essay film juxtaposes three disparate, present-tense situations to lay bare the enmeshed problems beneath the surface of our visible reality: depletion and conservation, extraction and cultivation. By comparing the nuns and fisherman of Pátzcuaro, both economically tethered to an endangered salamander of legendary regenerative properties, to the growers in Prosser’s apple industry, who look to devise new patents and automated harvesting machines, and finally to the work of an indigenous medical researcher who warns of the commodification of ethnic DNA, Clark and Gibisser extrapolate a foreboding vision of humanity’s future on earth, where the commons (resources shared by all) seem to be receding as swiftly and imperceptibly as our coastal shorelines. Woven with coolly framed images and carefully layered sounds, and edited with Hitchcockian suspense, A Common Sequence is a richly generative, open-ended experience from two of the most exciting filmmakers at work today.
The 2023 edition of First Look will take place March 15-19, in New York City.
