Argentine filmmaker Cinthia Rajschmir has unveiled the international trailer for her documentary Cortázar and Antín: Enlightened Letters / Cortázar y Antín: cartas iluminadas, based on the written correspondences between the legendary Paris-based writer and the Buenos Aires-based famed filmmaker that began in the late fifties before both of them became renowned.
The writer and the filmmakers became friends, and their letters crossed the Atlantic. Antín made three film based on stories written by Cortázar—Odd Number / La cifra impar (1962), Circe (1964), and Intimidad de los parques (1965)—generating ideas that broke the mold of its time. An ocean apart, they wrote together the script for Circe. Cortázar’s letters reveal a tension between the writer who advances on the space of the director and the director who tries to elude the winding bond between literature and films, while hidden forces in the stories embodied in characters that reached the screen, gravitate dangerously and mysteriously together.
One of the founders of the influential Latin American Boom literary movements, Cortázar (1914 – 1984) was one of the most important Spanish language writers of the 20th century who was an innovator of prose and created a new way of making literature breaking temporal linearity. He was raised in Argentina, where he lived for almost half of his life before moving to Europe in the fifties where he wrote most of his major works.
Antín (born 1926) directed 12 feature films between the sixties and early eighties, including Odd Number, The Venerable Ones / Los venerables todos (1963), and Punishment to the Traitor / Castigo al traidor (1966). In the eighties, he was named director of the Argentine Film Institute (Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales—INCAA), In 1991, he founded the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, one of South America’s leading film schools, where he continues to serve as director.
An official selection at the Havana, Buenos Aires (BAFICI), Quito, and LASA film festivals, and winner of the Best Documentary Award at the International Women's Film Festival in Punta del Este, Uruguay, and the Audience Award at the Trieste Latin American Film Festival in Italy, Cortázar and Antín: Enlightened Letters is a fascinating exploration of the relation between cinema and literature through the creative collaboration of two towering Argentine figures and includes interviews with Antín, his wife production designer Ponchi Morpurgo (Odd Number), cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich (Marcel Proust's Time Regained), and actresses Graciela Borges (La Ciénaga) and Dora Baret (The Terrace), among others.
Watch the trailer:
