Francisco Márquez and Andrea Testa’s film interrogates what it means to stay on the sidelines during a military government and asks whether such a stance is possible.
The film’s parallels are drawn so bluntly that they lose all suggestive force, since there’s little left to suggest.
The festival provided an opportunity to compare these modern works to epochal, recently restored Argentine documentaries from the 1960s.
It explicitly identifies its cinematic lineage and constantly refers back to a prestigious crime-film tradition.
Many of the excellent documentaries screened at BAFICI articulate a surprisingly coherent argument about nonfiction filmmaking and its relationship to the real.
All of these images had some connection to the artist’s documentaries, a thematic link reinforced by the layout of the exhibit.
The BAFICI seems to channel the sheer variety of the Internet, where it seems all movies from all eras are available.