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Florida Premiere Silver Bear Award, Berlin International FF
Saturday, Dec. 11 7 pm
Argentina, 2004; Daniel Burman, director
Spanish w/English sub.; 97 minutes
A bittersweet comedy of national, personal, and religious identity set in shabby Buenos Aires mall. An amusingly diverse group of merchants act as backdrop for the story of Ariel, who works in his mother’s lingerie shop, and wants to get a Polish passport so he can go to Europe and start a new life. But more than that, he wants the answer to why his father left home 20 years ago to go to Israel and never returned. He learns that his repressed anger at being abandoned conceals a greater need to recapture his father’s lost embrace.
Using low lights and hand-held cameras to captures the faint air of economic desperation in post-devaluation Argentina, what emerges is an unusually affirmative picture of a community of people who, though different, have in common a shared love of life.
Daniel Hendler, the broodingly handsome young lead, won Best Actor prize at the Berlin International Film Festival for this role and is familiar to PBJFF audiences from Waiting for the Messiah.
Says director Burman: When asked what am I first, Argentine or Jewish, I answer Argentine, but there is a constant tension between these two identities; they feed one another and are also separate from each other. I think there isn’t a Jew who lives in the Diaspora who doesn’t experience this feeling, and it is what I tried to express ion the film.
Filmmaker/Actor Invited
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