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Martin Rejtman is an acclaimed Argentine director known for his absurdist comedies and observational style. Throughout his career spanning three decades, he’s crafted films that illuminate the quirky dilemmas and interactions of everyday people. In Rejtman’s skilled hands, ordinary lives become a showcase for both laughter and melancholy introspection.

His latest film, The Practice, focuses on Gustavo, a yoga instructor living in Chile who’s recently separated from his wife Vanesa. As Gustavo struggles to find stability in the aftermath of divorce, a string of bizarre mishaps piles even more chaos onto his life. When an earthquake causes an accident at his class, a knee injury waylays his teaching, and a suspected theft rattles his studio, it’s clear the universe has no sympathy for Gustavo’s fragility.

Amidst the unpredictability, Rejtman infuses the story with his trademark dry wit. Through deft comedic timing and extended visual gags,...

This ensemble absurdist comedy centring on a hapless Argentinian yoga instructor in Chile and his extended circle is appropriately loose-limbed in structure, although a little overstretched here and there.

Esteban Bigliardi plays Gustavo, whose yoga studio is just about the only full thing in his life. He’s already split up with his wife Vanesa (Manuela Oyarzun), a fellow yogi, although they’re still going through the motions of attending therapist appointments. Vanesa got to keep their apartment, where she now continues to teach much smaller classes, while Gustavo kept the studio but moved into brother-in-law and his wife’s fog bank of a flat - “He smokes and his wife is an idiot,” everyone tells him in just one of Martín Rejtman long-running scripted jokes.

Gustavo is aiming for samadhi - the state of “joyful calm” aimed for by the Ashtanga Yoga tradition - but while he is permanently in a state of calmness.

Feature also screened at New York, London film festivals.

Visit Films will kick off talks at AFM in Santa Monica next week on San Sebastian absurdist comedy The Practice.

‘The Practice’: San Sebastian Review

Martín Rejtman wrote and directed the Argentina-Chile-Portugal- Germany co-production about recently separated yoga instructors Gustavo and Vanesa who find it difficult to live apart.

The film centres on a recently separated yoga instructor with a knee injury who must deal with the search for a new home, a meddling mother, and a flirtatious student.

Esteban Bigliardi, Camila Hirane (Fugitives), Manuela Oyarzún (The Good Life), and...

Writer-director Martín Rejtman’s La Práctica skillfully eases us into a world where yoga is a lifestyle and not just an exercise. This is a world that promises health for the health-conscious, an improvement of one’s life through strict scheduling discipline, and freedom from earthly troubles thanks to the influence of Hinduism that can still be felt in yoga’s practice. Pity, then, that Gustavo (Esteban Bigliardi), an Argentinian yoga instructor living in Chile, is no longer grounded in his connection to that practice, as his separation from his wife, Vanesa (Manuela Oyarzún), prompts a series of life changes that a Vinyasa pose can’t fix.

Despite his dedication to exercise and a vegan diet, Gustavo’s health is threatened by a series of stretching accidents and pratfalls, forcing him to teach his yoga classes with a limp. He lives, at first, with Vanesa’s brother and the man’s wife,...

The San Sebastián Film Festival has revealed the Official Selection for its latest edition, which is due to unfold from September 22 — 30.

The festival, which is celebrating its 71st edition, will screen Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu’s latest film Mmxx in competition. The festival describes the pic as a story that captures the “wanderings of a bunch of errant souls stuck at the crossroads of history.”

Belgian filmmaker Joachim Lafosse returns to San Sebastian this year with his tenth full-length film, A Silence, a drama starring Emmanuelle Devos and Daniel Auteuil. In 2015, he won the fest’s Silver Shell for Best Director for The White Knights, and two of his films have screened in the Perlak sidebar: After Love (2016) and The Restless (2021).

American filmmaker Raven Jackson will enter Competition with her debut film, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. The festival described the pic as “a lyrical exploration of the life of a woman in Mississippi.

Following up hit Chilean Netflix series “Bala Loca,” David Miranda Hardy, head of content development at Santiago-based Filmo Estudios, is developing a new crime thriller set against the backdrop of the ongoing dispute between the Mapuche indigenous people and the Chilean state.

“En la Frontera” (“The Frontier”) – one of the 10 finalist projects taking part in Pitch Copro Series at the Conecta Fiction TV co-production event in Pamplona, Spain, this year – grew out of a concept by novelist and screenwriter Simón Soto.

Soto approached Filmo Estudios following the release of “Bala Loca” with the idea of a crime thriller set at the center of the Mapuche conflict, said Hardy.

“We immediately clicked and started developing this story about a fascinating struggle that connects us with the whole continent and its history: From Canada and the U.S. to Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, we all share these cultural and territorial disputes in our DNA as Americans.