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Celebrated Argentine filmmaker Victoria Galardi returns to the San Sebastian Film Festival with her latest film in development, “The Hedgehogs “(“Los Erizos”), which participates in the prominent Spanish film event’s co-production forum.

Her dramedy “Cerro Bayo” competed in San Sebastian in 2010 where it won the Tve-Otra Mirada Award. In 2008, “Lovely Loneliness,” which Galardi co-directed with Martin Carranza, vied for the hefty cash prize in the festival’s Zabaltegi New Directors section and brought home a Youth Jury Award. Her 2013 pic “I Thought it was a Party” was nominated by the Argentine Academy for best editing, best cinematography and best production design.

Co-penned by Galardi and Fabian Casas, “The Hedgehogs” revolves around a couple who, after ten years of marriage, decide to separate. To break the news to their young son, they plan one last family trip to the sea. They arrive at an off-season coastal town, greeted by the caretaker,...

Laura Citarella’s lengthy romantic conundrum refuses to tie up its many loose ends but her film-making language ensures that cult status beckons

Laura Citarella’s movie is a coolly unhurried four hours-plus, split into two parts of around two hours each; it is from the same producer, in fact, as Argentinian auteur Mariano Llinás’s legendary 13-and-a-half hour film La Flor. Compared with that, Trenque Lauquen – whose title means “round lake” and is a city in Buenos Aires province – is a mere cine-haiku; but it is still a domestic epic, a giant puzzle, a whopping solutionless mystery and a meandering shaggy dog story with a hint of Borges or As Byatt’s Possession. And Citarella might have mixed these influences with Lynch or even David Robert Mitchell’s divisive noir Under the Silver Lake. Yet for all its deadpan charm, there is something here which I couldn’t quite make friends with,...

Heist movies tend to operate by a narrative rule of three: You show the preparation; you detail the execution, bit by painstaking bit; and you map out how the criminals and/or their crew get away with it, or don’t. The Delinquents, Argentine writer-director Rodrigo Moreno’s left-of-center contribution to the genre, dispenses with the first part entirely, and fast-forwards you right to second base. A bank manager named Morán (Daniel Elías) wakes up in the morning, gets dressed, and leisurely strolls through the streets of downtown Buenos Aires to work.

Mubi to release in US, Latin America, UK, other regions.

Argentina’s selection committee has submitted Rodrigo Moreno’s Cannes Un Certain Regard entry The Delinquents (Los Delincuentes) as this season’s international feature film contender.

The Delinquents: Cannes review

Mubi acquired rights for North America, UK & Ireland, Latin America, Turkey, Italy, India, and Benelux from Magnolia International.

The Delinquents stars Argentinian actors Daniel Elías, Esteban Bigliardi and Margarita Molfino and follows a Buenos Aires bank employee who dreams up a plan to free himself and his co-worker from the humdrum routine of their working lives.

Laura Paredes, Mariana Chaud,...

A group of bored Argentine bank employees plan a heist and try to figure out what to do with $650,000 in the latest trailer to Rodrigo Moreno’s “The Delinquents.”

Watch the trailer embed above.

The Spanish-language film stars Argentinian actors Daniel Elías (“The Snatch Thief”), Esteban Bigliardi (“The Summit”), Margarita Molfino (“The Accused”), and features Laura Paredes, Mariana Chaud (“La Flor”), Cecilia Rainero (“Trenque Lauquen”) and Germán De Silva (“Las Acacias”).

According to the film’s official synopsis: Bank employee Morán (Eliás) schemes to steal enough money to liberate himself from corporate monotony, then confesses and serves prison time while his co-worker hides the cash. Soon under pressure by a company investigator, accomplice Román (Bigliardi) later encounters a mysterious woman who will transform him forever.

“I punch in every day,” Morán says in the trailer. “All that for what?”

“The Delinquents” was written and directed by Moreno, who was a...

Spain, China, Middle East among buyers for Rodrigo Moreno’s selection.

Magnolia International has reported ongoing robust trade on Cannes Un Certain Regard selection The Delinquents (Los Delincuentes) following the multi-territory Mubi deal and has licensed a raft of additional key territories.

Rights to Rodrigo Moreno’s film have gone in Spain (Filmin), Greece (Weirdwave), Taiwan (Filmware), China (Hugoeast), Middle East (Gulf), Portugal (Leopardo Filmes), Israel (New Cinema), and worldwide airlines rights (Anuvu), with other territories under negotiation.

As previously reported Mubi acquired the Argentinian filmmaker’s crime thriller for North America, UK, Latin America, Italy, Benelux, Turkey, Germany, and India.

Lost in the Night (Amat Escalante).The more familiar one becomes with Cannes, the less one comes to expect anything like aesthetic coherence from it. Even if one accepts its nominal (or self-proclaimed) status as the standard-setter for international arthouse cinema, there’s still a fair amount of variation within its vast program. Which is to say that while one can lament the general calcification of festival-circuit aesthetics, the arbitrary programming decisions of Thierry Frémaux, or the often perplexing set of awards handed out each year, there are always films worth seeking out. In 1982, the French critic Serge Daney remarked that Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman and Godard’s Passion were part of cinema’s “secret factory”: that is, films which wouldn’t receive awards, but from which future directors would draw inspiration in years to come. The challenge with each edition, of course, is to discover which films those are.

Most of us know the illicit rush of the sick day slyly pulled when you’re not really sick. The turning you ignore on your commute, but that one day, for no real reason, you take. Oh, that sudden, intoxicating sniff of freedom! It’s perhaps the closest thing that many of us get as adults to the ceaseless adventure we thought, as children, we’d be living. Argentinian writer-director Rodrigo Moreno’s delightful “The Delinquents” knows the feeling too. Over the course of its droll, meandering, indefinably strange three hours, it may well persuade you that the crazy thing is not to break from your normal routine. The crazy thing is to ever go back.

Filmmakers have long been attracted to the heist format for the high drama it can generate, but Moreno begins his movie with a bank robbery so banal it’s hard to believe that’s actually what is going on.

The Spanish-language comedy-drama screens at Cannes in Un Certain Regard.

Mubi has acquired Rodrigo Moreno’s Cannes Un Certain Regard entry The Delinquents in an all-rights deal for North America, the UK, Ireland, Latin America, Turkey, Italy, India and Benelux.

The global distributor and streaming service will release the Spanish-language comedy-drama theatrically in North America, the UK and other territories, with release plans and exclusive streaming dates expected to be announced soon. Magnolia International is representing worldwide rights to the film.

Starring Argentinian actors Daniel Elías, Esteban Bigliardi and Margarita Molfino, The Delinquents centres on a Buenos Aires bank employee...

Rodrigo Moren’s “The Deliquents” has been scooped up by Mubi out of the Cannes Film Festival. The distributor has acquired the rights to the film in North America, UK, Ireland, Latin America, Turkey, Italy, India, and Benelux and has plans for both a theatrical and streaming plan in the coming months.

According to the film’s official synopsis: Morán (Daniel Eliás) is a bank employee in Buenos Aires who dreams up a risky plan to liberate himself and his co-worker Román (Esteban Bigliardi) from the shackles of working life: Morán will steal enough cash from the bank to fund their retirement if Román hides the money for him after he confesses and serves prison time; in three years’ time, they’ll reunite, split the cash, and never have to work again.

Departing to the countryside to fulfill his side of the deal, the less adventurous Román finds himself transformed...

Exclusive: Here at the Cannes Film Festival, Mubi has taken rights in North America, UK, Italy, Latin America, Turkey, India and Benelux to Un Certain Regard movie The Delinquents (Los Delincuentes).

Mubi will theatrically release the Spanish-language comedy-drama in North America, UK, Latin America, and some of their other markets.

The deal was negotiated between Mubi and Magnolia International who represents worldwide rights to the film.

Rodrigo Moreno’s feature stars Argentinian actors Daniel Elías (The Snatch Thief), Esteban Bigliardi (The Summit), Margarita Molfino (The Accused), Laura Paredes, Mariana Chaud (La Flor), Cecilia Rainero (Trenque Lauquen), and Germán De Silva (Las Acacias).

Pic follows Morán and Román, who are both looking for freedom and adventure. One commits a robbery, discovering an alternative to his boring life, while the other hides money that doesn’t belong to him. Their destiny as new criminals will bring them together.

Pic is produced...

There are movies that grab you by the throat and refuse to let go until the story ends. And there are others that playfully take your hand, guiding you into stories that blossom and fold in on themselves several times over, leading to endings that are more like beginnings.

For the past five years, a crop of films from Argentina has been specializing in the latter type, telling long, winding, labyrinthine stories inspired by the French Nouvelle Vague — especially Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating and his serial epic, Out 1 — as well as Latin American postmodernists like Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Roberto Bolaño.

With mammoth running times and multiple characters, Mariano Llinás’ six-part, 13-hour La Flor (2018) and Laura Citarella’s two-part, six-hour Trenque Lauquen (2022), are the best-known examples of the genre. Enigmatic and absorbing, they have found a fanbase at festivals and on specialty streaming sites,...

Magnolia Pictures International has acquired worldwide sales rights — including U.S. sales rights — to heist comedy-drama “The Delinquents” from Argentinian writer-director Rodrigo Moreno (“The Custodian”). The film will world premiere as part of the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival.

In “The Delinquents,” the routine lives of two bank employees, Morán and Román, break down when Morán steals a small fortune from the bank’s vault. On the run, he glimpses a possible alternative to the gray life he’s been living and, in addition, falls in love. But he is forced to choose between this radical alternative and following through on his heist plans, so he resigns himself to a short prison stint. His colleague Román, unwillingly in possession of the stolen money, feels trapped by the secret he’s keeping; his paranoia increases until he too finds a way out, and also discovers a new love.

Laura Paredes as Laura in Trenque Lauquen. Laura Citrella on writing with her star: 'It was great, because I had a partner to whom I could talk every day about the film and who also was the main character' Photo: El Pampero Cine Laura Citrella’s Trenque Lauquen - which opens today (April 21) in New York before screening elsewhere in the US - is the sort of work you can kick back and relax into. Her story, which runs across more than four hours and two films, takes viewers not only on a journey into multiple stories through the consideration of a single life but also on a walk across a cinematic landscape, from historical romance to mystery drama and something altogether more fantastical.

The story is driven by, though not always centred upon, Laura, a botanist who is collecting orchid samples in Trenque Lauquen - a real place in Argentina.

Argentinian writer-director Laura Citarella, part of the film collective El Pampero Cine responsible for such monumental work as La Flor, presented her third feature Trenque Lauquen at the 2022 Venice Film Festival to great acclaim. Divided into Part 1 and Part 2 with a total runtime of over four hours, it’s a shape-shifting tale of suspense, romance, and science fiction surrounding the disappearance of a woman played by co-writer Laura Paredes.

Ahead of its stateside release beginning at Film at Lincoln Center this Friday, we had the chance to speak with Citarella about the creation of this enchantingly unique film.

The Film Stage: Trenque Lauquen is an actual place in Argentina. What made you decide to set your film there?

Laura Citarella: I was thinking of making another film with Laura Paredes, with whom I made my first feature Ostende, which was also about a character who looks at the world and finds stories everywhere.

A favorite on the festival circuit last year, the U.S. trailer arrives for Argentine filmmaker Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen, which took six years to make. Co-written by Citarella and Laura Paredes (who stars), the film totals 262 minutes and follows a woman also named Laura who has disappeared in the titular town (which the filmmaker has familial roots in). This is the second film of Citarella’s that revolves around the Laura character, the first being 2011’s Ostende. Notably, Trenque Lauquen was one of Film Comment’s Best Undistributed Films of 2022, and will now get a North American theatrical release courtesy […]

The post Trailer Watch: Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A favorite on the festival circuit last year, the U.S. trailer arrives for Argentine filmmaker Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen, which took six years to make. Co-written by Citarella and Laura Paredes (who stars), the film totals 262 minutes and follows a woman also named Laura who has disappeared in the titular town (which the filmmaker has familial roots in). This is the second film of Citarella’s that revolves around the Laura character, the first being 2011’s Ostende. Notably, Trenque Lauquen was one of Film Comment’s Best Undistributed Films of 2022, and will now get a North American theatrical release courtesy […]

The post Trailer Watch: Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

While many films through the summer movie season will boast of their epic scope, we imagine the results will pale in comparison to a fall festival highlight that is now arriving in theaters. As a producer of Extraordinary Stories and La Flor, Laura Citarella is well-versed in telling tales on a large canvas. Her latest feature––the two-part, four-hour Trenque Lauquen––will open on April 21 at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center and April 29 at LA’s American Cinematheque. Ahead of the release from Cinema Guild, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the new trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: The search for a missing woman unspools in two unexpectedly interconnected parts in Laura Citarella’s playful new feature. The missing woman is Laura (Laura Paredes), a biologist cataloging plant species in and around the Argentinean city of Trenque Lauquen. The men searching for her: Rafael, her boyfriend, and Ezequiel, a...

Argentina, 1985 Review — Argentina, 1985 (2022) Film Review, a movie directed by Santiago Mitre, written by Mariano Llinas, Martin Mauregui and Santiago Mitre and starring Ricardo Darin, Peter Lanzani, Norman Briski, Laura Paredes, Susana Pampin, Francisco Bertin, Carlos Portaluppi, Alejo Garcia Pintos and Alejandra Flechner. Filmmaker Santiago Mitre tells a very powerful story in [...]

Continue reading: Film Review: Argentina, 1985 (2022): Lawyers Take On a Historic Case in a Tense, Well-Acted Dramatic Film...

Mubi Podcast: Encuentros returns this week with a new episode.The fifth episode features:Laura Paredes, an Argentine actress, recognized in the theater scene for being part of Piel de Lava, one of the most outstanding groups inside and outside her country for its strong experimental approach. Paredes has worked in film with Argentine directors such as Martín Rejtman, Santiago Mitre, and Matías Piñeiro. She has starred in Laura Citarella's two feature films: Ostende (2011) and Trenque Lauquen (2022), the latter of which premiered at the most recent edition of the Venice Film Festival.  The second guest is Manuela Martelli, a Chilean actress and director whose career began with outstanding performances in films in her country directed by Andrés Wood and Gonzalo Justiniano. Since then, she has appeared in films by renowned Latin American directors such as Sebastián Lelio, Martín Rejtman, and Alicia Scherson, as well as in projects in Italy,...

New York-based The Cinema Guild has acquired the Venice title “Trenque Lauquen” for distribution in the U.S., it was announced on Friday.

Luxbox, the Paris-based sales agency and production company, has also scored deals for Laura Citarella’s adventure mystery for France (Capricci) and Spain (Vitrine and Filmes). The deals were closed by Jennyfer Gautier, head of international sales at Luxbox.

“We are thrilled to accompany ‘Trenque Lauquen’ in its theatrical debut with such partners. This blend of romance and mystery benefited from a strong festival launch in Venice, San Sebastian and New York, and we are now eager to see it continue its journey around the world,” said Gautier.

The film had its world premiere on Sept. 8 in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival. One of the main character is a female detective first seen in Citarella’s debut feature “Ostende.” In the first part of the film,...

Film Factory Entertainment has acquired sales rights to “Blondi,” the feature debut of Argentina’s Dolores Fonzi, star of Santiago Mitre’s Cannes Critics’ Week winner “Paulina.”

Amazon’s Prime Video has licensed “Blondi” for VOD in the U.S. and Latin America. Mitre, whose “Argentina, 1985” is being talked up as an international feature Oscar frontrunner, produces “Blondi.”

The film, now in post-production, will be brought onto the market by Film Factory at this week’s American Film Market.

“We are delighted to be part of Fonzi’s first adventure as a director. The script is moving and I am sure the film will leave no one indifferent”, Film Factory’s general director Vicente Canales told Variety.

Further producers are Agustina Llambi Campbell and Santiago Carabante at La Unión de los Ríos, Mark Johnson and Tom Williams from Gran Via Productions and Fernanda del Nido at Setembro Cine (“Una Mujer...

Laura Paredes in Trenque Lauquen.Fittingly for a film tracking a botanist along her quest for an ultra-rare flower, Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen unfurls like the network of a rose, each of its myriad tales unveiling and spilling into the next. Stretched across 250 minutes, split into twelve chapters, and divided into two parts, the film is a maze of forking paths, the cinematic equivalent of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, who hovers above it as an essential touchstone. This is, after all, a Pampero Cine production, the Buenos Aires collective that spawned Mariano Llinás’s 2018 epic La Flor, another sprawling multi-genre pastiche that looked to the rhizomatic writings by Borges and other Río de la Plata scribes for inspiration. Back in 1969, together with director Hugo Santiago and fellow writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges co-wrote Invasión, a portrait of a fictional city, Aquileia, under an endless siege. Modeled on Buenos Aires,...

There are many films that start with a bang and many that climax at the end. There are fewer that wow with a deliberately calibrated, orgiastic halfway mark. This (among many other qualities) makes Argentinian director Laura Citarella’s beguiling, shape-shifting epic Trenque Lauquen something of a rarity. The first half of the 250-minute film concludes with a wordless scene of contemplation that abruptly cuts to a title sequence for the ages. This brutal transition comes as a surprise—not only because nothing in the two hours you’ve just spent has prepared you for the mean glare of strobe light and nasty electro beat accompanying the credits list. It also feels like a promise, a dare: “Think that’s enough weirdness for one movie? We’re just getting started.” However fatigued or perplexed one may be at this point, the sweet kick of adrenaline from this madly confident interlude...

Paris-based sales agency and production company Luxbox has released the trailer for “Trenque Lauquen,” Argentine director-producer Laura Citarella’s adventure mystery that has its world premiere Sept. 8 in the Horizons sidebar of the Venice Film Festival. Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer, which can be seen below.

Filmed in two parts, Citarella’s fourth feature begins with a pair of men both searching for a woman who has mysteriously vanished. While one of them claims to be her boyfriend, the other has also forged an intimate bond with the missing woman, with a series of flashbacks revealing that he’s also fallen in love with her.

The disappearance exposes more secrets, including the secret of another woman who vanished decades ago; the secret of a town where a supernatural incident remains a mystery; and the secret of the plains where the lost woman wandered.

“Trenque Lauquen,” which...

Paris-based sales agency and production company Luxbox has snagged the rights to “Trenque Lauquen,” the fourth feature by Argentine director-producer Laura Citarella, ahead of its Sept. 8 world premiere in the Venice Horizons sidebar.

The pick-up continues Luxbox’s strong line in Latin American titles, seen this year in Sundance entry “Dos Estaciones” and Cannes Directors’ Fortnight title “1976” as well as “Pornomelancholia,” the latest documentary feature from award-winning director Manuel Abramovich, which competes in San Sebastián.

Filmed in two parts, “Trenque Lauquen” begins with a couple of men, Rafael and Ezequiel, who are on the road, both searching for a woman, Laura, who has vanished.

Rafael claims to be her boyfriend while Ezequiel drove her around as she investigated the mystery behind multiple love letters that she discovered hidden in library books. Flashbacks of the time Ezequiel spends with her reveals that he has fallen in love with Laura as he...

Mariano Llinás' La Flor is showing July and August on Mubi in the United States.1.In the Argentinian film La Flor (2018), a certain kind of sight and a certain kind of sound predominate—spread right across its roughly thirteen-and-a-half hours and six major parts.First, the sight. There are various directors in cinema history known for their stubborn insistence on using a particular camera lens which becomes their veritable stylistic signature: for example, the 25-millimeter lens for deep focus effect in Jacques Rivette; or the split diopter in Brian De Palma. Mariano Llinás takes the exactly opposite position in La Flor: his lens-weapon of choice is a defiantly shallow one, plunging great expanses of any frame into blur. Sometimes there’s a relatively traditional bit of focus-pulling back and forth between two points in a scene. Far more often, it’s a mise en scène based on characters slowly...

Save for the below three texts, written daily and without distance, my thoughts on Mariano Llinás’s La flor are now mostly lost and long gone. Premiered in three parts across three days at the tail-end of the 2018 Locarno Film Festival, this 14-hour film full of endless dead ends remains more memorable for the unique conditions of its viewing than for its many plots. In spite of instructive interludes scattered throughout—Llinás does announce each episode’s excluded beginning, middle, or end, an admonition that promises no unity other than the reliable reappearance and reinvention of its four star performers—any spectator would have every reason to doubt Llinas’s reliability as narrator, inclined instead to approach with caution and see for themselves. And so, with a unique opportunity to embrace uncertainty and be suspended in self-doubt, blindly writing on La flor became as pleasurable as watching La flor. Free...

A decade in the making, Mariano Llinás’ “La Flor” opens this weekend from Grasshopper Film. Clocking in at over 13 hours across six “episodes,” “La Flor” brings a whole new meaning to the concept of binge-watching. Each episode stars Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes. It’s an epic of subplots within subplots, unexpected digressions, and genres on top of genres — from a B-movie to a musical to a spy thriller, a period piece, a remake of a French classic, and, finally, to something altogether metafictional.

Grasshopper promises a “wildly entertaining… adventure in scale and duration” — and quite possibly in patience as well. “La Flor” earns its place among history’s very long movies, from Raúl Ruiz’s “Mysteries of Lisbon,” Jacques Rivette’s “Out 1” and Bela Tarr’s “Sátántangó” to pretty much anything directed by Lav Diaz, the modern master of slow cinema.

Originally, “La Flor...

The first thing to know about “La Flor” is that it’s 14 hours and 28 minutes long. The second is that it more than justifies that intimidating runtime, which is divided into six episodes.

Each discrete story unfolds according to the dictates of a different genre, which is to say that Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás’ unique achievement is a B-movie, a musical mystery, a spy thriller, a self-reflexive metafiction, a black-and-white riff on Renoir’s “A Day in the Country,” and a vague dramatization of an 18th-century Englishwoman’s account of being abducted by Native Americans — all at once. The same quartet of actresses star in all but one episode, lending the affair much-needed continuity.

Llinás himself opens the film to introduce his ambitious project, mapping out the structure on a sheet of paper in a way that explains the title: Four of the stories have a beginning but no end; the fifth,...

"An astonishment." Grasshopper Film has unveiled an official trailer for an intriguing cinema project titled La Flor, made by Argentinian filmmaker Mariano Llinás. A decade in the making, La Flor is a 14-hour long film that is being shown in four parts. La Flor "robs" the cinema in six episodes. Each episode corresponds to a cinematographic genre. The first is a "B-series", as the Americans used to do. The second is a musical melodrama with a hint of mystery. The third is a spy movie. The fourth is an abyss of cinema. The fifth revisits an old French film. The sixth speaks of captive women in the 19th century. These six episodes, these six genres have one thing in common: their four actresses. Starring Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes. This is really only for die-hard cinema nerds who feel the need to sit through it, because...

Joining the rarified pantheon of expansive cinematic storytelling occupied by the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks, and any number of Lav Diaz films comes Mariano Llinás’ 14-hour epic La Flor. Following a festival tour including Locarno, New York, and Toronto, Grasshopper Film will now unleash the cinematic event of the year starting next week in New York City and we’re pleased to premiere the trailer.

A decade in the making and shot across three continents, the film stars Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes across six episodes, each bringing a different genre to the table, from a bonkers B-movie about mummies to a musical to a spy thriller to a Renoir remake and beyond. Llinás, who burst onto the international filmmaking scene with 2008’s four-hour Extraordinary Stories,...

In today’s film news roundup, Michael B. Jordan’s “The Silver Bear” finds a director, biopic “Running for My Life” is in the works, Fox is using new trailer compliance software and the 14-hour “La Flor” gets distribution.

Director Attachment

Gerard McMurray, director of “The First Purge,” will write and direct Michael B. Jordan’s thriller “The Silver Bear” from Lionsgate, Nickel City Pictures and Jordan’s Outlier Society.

McMurray was a producer on Jordan’s 2013 breakout drama “Fruitvale Station.” Jordan became attached to the “The Silver Bear” in October.

“The Silver Bear” is based on the book series by Derek Haas, the screenwriter for “Wanted” and “3:10 to Yuma.” The novel centers on an assassin named Columbus — called the Silver Bear by some — who tracks a powerful politician with presidential aspirations.

Project Launch

Film Roman Productions, best known for producing “The Simpsons,” is starting production of its first non-animated feature film,...

Mariano Llinas’ 14-hour prize-winner will get a theatrical run this summer.

Grasshopper Film has acquired Us distribution rights to La Flor, Argentinian director Mariano Llinas’ 14-hour feature that premiered at the Locarno festival and came out a prize-winner at this month’s Rotterdam festival.

Grasshopper plans to open the film theatrically in New York and around the Us this summer, with a release on digital platforms to follow.

A decade in the making, La Flor follows four actresses - Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes - through six episodes, including a monster movie, a musical, a spy...

Tucked deep into Mariano Llinás’ monumental 14-hour, 3-part, 6-episode epic La Flor is a montage that only spans a few minutes. Introducing the film’s third and final part atop the stage of Locarno’s L’Altra Sala a few hours prior, Llinás had warned the segment would predate the screening’s second interlude – the announcement part of a habitual routine where the Argentinian would stand before the crowd to remind everyone when to brace for the short-lived bathroom breaks. “There’ll be a second chance, right after a beautiful scene with las cuatros chicas, the four girls.”

The four girls are the terrific members of Piel de Lava, an acting quartet comprising of Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes. They are the only link between the six episodes structuring La Flor – six tales which, as Llinás himself spells out during the film’s preamble, one in several metafictional ruptures,...

The following essay was produced as part of the 2018 Locarno Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring film critics that took place during the Locarno Film Festival.

In a present that is increasingly difficult to comprehend, directing one’s gaze towards the past is not only comforting — it also helps contextualize the present moment. This year’s edition of the Locarno Film Festival certainly had that effect, as many of its films — ranging from the mammoth projections in Piazza Grande (with titles ranging from Lino Brocka’s “Manila in the Claws of Light” and Spike Lee’s “BlackKklansman”) to the films included across its myriad sections — were visibly driven by the desire to showcase history.

Locarno is both an outlet for cutting-edge films that showcase the most recent developments across the global independent film industry, and a space that honors masterpieces of the past. An entire section of the festival — the...

Where to begin? Described by the 71st edition’s artistic director Carlo Chatrian as “a new way to watch films,” Argentine director Mariano Llinás’s latest has been touted as the longest film in the history of the great Locarno Festival. Running an exceptional 14 hours, the first 206 minutes of Llinás’s episodic epic—to be more specific, six stories told in three parts—proved a promising pulp anomaly. So far, so good. La Flor, a celebratory showcase that, in spite of its daunting duration, is not yet ever uneventful, is in no sense slow or contemplative cinema: a form that, by design, might produce the kind of fatigue necessary to find whatever epiphany lies beyond our boredom.Though its many plots seem to extend into perpetuity, La Flor, variously abbreviated and abridged, instead flourishes with an abandon, following no rules other than its own. Llinás’s prologue begins with two images,...

Cult filmmaker and scriptwriter Mariano Llinas' epic 14 hour-long film La Flor (The Flower) topped the 20th edition of the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, which began on April 11 and ends Sunday. The film also won the best actress award for its four leads Pilar Gamboa, Valeria Correa, Elisa Carricajo and Laura Paredes.

A record-breaking, 840-minutes film – the longest fiction feature in Argentine history – La flor consists of six different episodes, all starring the same four actresses, who form the acting company Piel de Lava ("Lava Skin"). Shot independently throughout a nine-year period across three continents,...

Cult filmmaker and scriptwriter Mariano Llinas' epic 14-hour-long film <em>La Flor </em>(<em>The Flower</em>) topped the 20th edition of the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, which began April 11 and ends Sunday. The film also won the best actress award for its four leads, Pilar Gamboa, Valeria Correa, Elisa Carricajo and Laura Paredes.

The longest fiction feature in Argentine history, <em>La flor </em>consists of six different episodes, all starring the same four actresses, who form the acting company Piel de Lava ("Lava Skin"). Shot independently over a nine-year period across three continents and split into three parts for ...

Every so often, a film comes along without much of a “heads up” through a trailer or really even festival buzz, and absolutely punches you square in the gut. Maybe it is an exciting new filmmaker making his or her debut, or there is a revelatory lead performance from an actor you’re not well versed in. And sometimes it’s both, and so very much more.

That is the case with the new political thriller The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis. The directing debut of co-directors Andrea Testa and Francisco Marquez, the film sends the viewer back to 1977 in Argentina, where the country is under oppressive junta rule. Taking a decidedly intimate approach to engrossing the viewer in this brutal regime and its effects on the larger country, the film focuses entirely on one man, the titular Sanctis. A simple, unassuming man going about his life with wife Angelica (Laura Paredes) and two children,...

Well over a year ago, Vadim Rizov visited the set of Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro’s latest, Hermia & Helena, now premiering in competition in Locarno. He noted that Piñeiro’s first three features have all "started from a Shakespearean source text: As You Like It for Rosalinda, Twelfth Night for Viola, Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France." The key text this time around is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Not only has Piñeiro set much of the film in New York for the first time, he's added a slew of newcomers to his cast of regulars: Agustina Muñoz, María Villar, Pablo Sigal, Kyle Molzan, Ryan Miyake, Oscar Williams, Mati Diop, Julian Larquier, Keith Poulson, Dan Sallitt, Laura Paredes, Dustin Guy Defa, Gabi Saidón and Romina Paula. We're collecting reviews and interviews. » - David Hudson...

Well over a year ago, Vadim Rizov visited the set of Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro’s latest, Hermia & Helena, now premiering in competition in Locarno. He noted that Piñeiro’s first three features have all "started from a Shakespearean source text: As You Like It for Rosalinda, Twelfth Night for Viola, Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France." The key text this time around is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Not only has Piñeiro set much of the film in New York for the first time, he's added a slew of newcomers to his cast of regulars: Agustina Muñoz, María Villar, Pablo Sigal, Kyle Molzan, Ryan Miyake, Oscar Williams, Mati Diop, Julian Larquier, Keith Poulson, Dan Sallitt, Laura Paredes, Dustin Guy Defa, Gabi Saidón and Romina Paula. We're collecting reviews and interviews. » - David Hudson...

More often than not, when people think of an artist adapting a work from the legendary Bard himself, William Shakespeare, they conjure up visions of stilted costume pictures with more interest in production values than truly getting to the heart of Shakespeare’s tale they are adapting. And then there are the films of Matias Pineiro.

Pineiro, a young filmmaker from Buenos Aires, has become known as much for his dream like visuals and sensual storytelling as he has his brilliant re-imaginings of Shakespearean comedies. With a short film Rosalinda and his last feature, Viola, he has begun a new project of sorts, adapting As You Like It and Twelfth Night respectively, bringing his quiet and heady filmmaking to the works of Shakespeare.

That’s where his new film comes into play. Building off of this short and feature project, Pineiro is back with one of his greatest works to date.

Opening Night – World Premiere

Gone Girl

David Fincher, USA, 2014, Dcp, 150m

David Fincher’s film version of Gillian Flynn’s phenomenally successful best seller (adapted by the author) is one wild cinematic ride, a perfectly cast and intensely compressed portrait of a recession-era marriage contained within a devastating depiction of celebrity/media culture, shifting gears as smoothly as a Maserati 250F. Ben Affleck is Nick Dunne, whose wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing on the day of their fifth anniversary. Neil Patrick Harris is Amy’s old boyfriend Desi, Carrie Coon (who played Honey in Tracy Letts’s acclaimed production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is Nick’s sister Margo, Kim Dickens (Treme, Friday Night Lights) is Detective Rhonda Boney, and Tyler Perry is Nick’s superstar lawyer Tanner Bolt. At once a grand panoramic vision of middle America, a uniquely disturbing exploration of the fault lines in a marriage,...