THE IDEA OF A LAKE
(La idea de un lago, by Milagros Mumenthaler, Argentina/Switzerland, 2016, 82 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)

NYC PREMIERE!

Based on Guadalupe Gaona’s novel, POZO DE AIRE, Milagros Mumenthaler’s second feature delves deeper into the relationship of cinema with loss, memory, and youth. Inés, a photographer, is putting together a book of poems and images about her own past. In doing so, she finds her family dynamics shifting, as she and her mother and brother all come to terms with the absence of her father, who disappeared during the military dictatorship in Argentina. Mumenthaler moves away from the realm of naturalist representation in order to swim into the more obscure waters of artifice. The quest to make present what is absent suffuses the film and establishes Mumenthaler as one of the most interesting voices in contemporary Argentine cinema.

“The film explores the idea of memory on several different levels, and demonstrates how memories can be transformed by things that happen in the present. That’s really the core of the film – the intimate memories that we all have, but also the idea of memory as a civic and political right.” –Milagros Mumenthaler

This screening is part of: IF YOU CAN SCREEN IT THERE: PREMIERING CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA