Ongoing
Anthology Film Archives
New York City, despite its status as a world capital of cinema, regularly misses out on screenings of many key international films. Though the exhibition of Latin American cinema in the city has drastically increased over the years, a considerable number of influential movies from the region still fail to premiere locally. In 2017, Anthology Film Archives and Cinema Tropical joined forces to create an ongoing series – programmed by Matías Piñeiro and Carlos A. Gutiérrez – of monthly screenings featuring remarkable Latin American films making their local premiere. We paused the series (formerly entitled “If You Can Screen It There”) following the pandemic, but we’re delighted to revive it now, rechristened as “Lost & Found: Cine(ma)s Latinoamericanos Re-Unidos”. Far from minor works, the films included here are by some of the region’s most important filmmakers, have garnered major awards at international festivals, and provide an important window into the often-overlooked world of Latin American cinema.
Co-presented by Anthology Film Archives and Cinema Tropical. Programmed by Matías Piñeiro and Carlos A. Gutiérrez.
All screenings at Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue (at 2nd Street), New York City
(212) 505-5181 / www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
Upcoming Screenings:
UNDEFINED THINGS / LAS COSAS INDEFINIDAS
A film by María Aparicio
(Argentina, 2023, 83 min. In In Spanish with English subtitles)
The third feature by Argentine filmmaker María Aparicio, winner of the Cinema Tropical Award for Best Latin American Film, Undefined Things is a delicate meditation on cinema, memory, and mourning. Eva, a 50-year-old film editor – portrayed with quiet grace by Eva Bianco – is working with her young assistant, Rami, on a documentary about people living with blindness, while grappling with the recent death of Juan, a filmmaker friend whose films she once edited. As loneliness and doubt begin to settle into her daily life, Eva starts to question her relationship to cinema and the meaning of her craft. With a subtle and introspective narrative, the film explores the boundaries between fiction and documentary and the persistence of images as traces of the past.
CIDADE; CAMPO
A film by Juliana Rojas
(Brazil/Germany/France, 2024, 119 min, In Portuguese with English subtitles)
The latest film by acclaimed Brazilian director Juliana Rojas (GOOD MANNERS) – winner of the Best Director Award at Berlinale’s Encounters competition – weaves two stories of migration, memory, and haunting loss. After a catastrophic flood devastates her rural land, Joana flees to São Paulo with her sister and grandson, struggling to rebuild her life amid the city’s chaos, haunted by what she left behind. Meanwhile, Flavia, grappling with her estranged father’s death, moves with her wife Mara to his remote farm, confronting lingering family ghosts and unresolved grief. Through these parallel journeys, CIDADE; CAMPO offers a powerful meditation on the search for belonging and the fragile, often invisible bonds that connect us to the places we call home.
EARTH ALTARS / LA TIERRA LOS ALTARES
A film by Sofía Peypoch
(Mexico, 2023, 68 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
In her haunting debut feature, Mexican filmmaker and visual artist Sofía Peypoch returns to the site of her kidnapping, undertaking a visceral excavation of memory beneath the earth’s surface. Through intimate, tactile gestures – her hands probing the soil alongside others replicating this chimerical act – the film weaves personal trauma with ancestral history, positioning the earth as an unyielding witness that refuses to forget. Combining film, photography, ceramic sculpture, and found objects, Peypoch crafts a sensory meditation on memory as a living, mutable space where past and present converge. EARTH ALTARS intricately explores how archaeology lends historical depth to intimate trauma, creating a profound dialogue between personal and collective histories.
Past Screenings:
WHEN CLOUDS HIDE THE SHADOW / CUANDO LAS NUBES ESCONDEN LA SOMBRA
A film by José Luis Torres Leiva
(Chile/Argentina/South Korea, 2024, 71 min. DCP, 2023, 71 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
U.S. Premiere!
María travels to Puerto Williams, at the southern tip of Chile, to star in a film. But when a powerful storm prevents the crew from arriving, she finds herself stranded and alone. As she seeks relief for a sudden bout of severe back pain, María begins to discover the rhythms of life in the world’s southernmost city – and with it, an unresolved chapter from her own past. The latest film by acclaimed director José Luis Torres Leiva features María Alché—the Argentine director of A Family Submerged and star of Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl—in a quietly luminous performance. Meditative and atmospheric, the film unfolds like a diary of solitude and revelation, capturing the fragile beauty of place, memory, and the passage of time.
SILENT WITNESSES / MUDOS TESTIGOS
A film by Luis Ospina and Jerónimo Atehortúa
(Colombia, 2023, 78 min. No dialogue)
New York Premiere!
Silent Witnesses is an imaginative journey through the history of Colombia—and its cinema—during the tumultuous first half of the 20th century, using exclusively the surviving footage of Colombian silent cinema. This melodrama tells the impossible love story between Efraín and Alicia, set against the political upheaval in the early 1900s. The story begins with Efraín falling in love with Alicia, a woman promised to Uribe, a powerful and vengeful strongman. Their romance quickly unfolds into a journey through the heart of the jungle, where Efraín witnesses the dire conditions of peasants in the southern region and the birth of an armed rebellion. This film is the last work of the late Luis Ospina, one of the most influential filmmakers in Latin American cinema, and the debut feature of producer and film critic Jerónimo Atehortúa.
RIDERS / EL REPARTIDOR ESTÁ EN CAMINO
A film by Martín Rejtman
(Argentina/Portugal/Venezuela, 2024, 82 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
U.S. Premiere!
“A leading light of the New Argentine Cinema (with Lucrecia Martel and Lisandro Alonso, among others) at the end of the 1990s, Martín Rejtman is best known for his minimalist fiction. His second documentary is set in Buenos Aires during the pandemic and follows delivery drivers for local UberEats clone apps, the majority of which are Venezuelans who have fled the crisis ravaging their country. The precise framing highlights the mechanical aspect behind the work that these young men do. Constantly on the go, carrying their fluorescent, cube-shaped delivery bags, they have become the paradoxically invisible icons of 2.0 platforms. However, Rejtman also intends to give them depth by filming the day-to-day life of Joel and his brother, particularly their private life. These two ‘riders’, recently arrived in Argentina, put human faces on the anonymous collective of delivery drivers, and establish a connection with the second part of the film, which was shot in their home country. Through exceptionally fluid editing work, the Argentinian director has created a humanist and structuralist film which powerfully reveals the close links between migratory dynamics and the net economy, at opposite ends of the South American continent.” –Emmanuel Chicon, Visions du Réel
