With the release of Universal Crime, a psychological thriller with the shadow of Luquesia Martel's work, let's take a look at the highlights of Argentina's post-millennial film boom.
Argentine cinema has already made its mark in the 21st century. Like Brazil and Mexico, it has been one of the larger film industries in Latin America, often ahead of the curve when it shows a fault line in which a country "disappeared" more than 30,000 people when it embraced a military dictatorship (1976-1983).
At the turn of the century, a lean, poetic culture of filmmaking emerged. The new Argentine cinema is characterized by a sense of urgency and immediacy, which stands in stark contrast to the more calm and allegorical works of older filmmakers such as Fernando Solanas and Luis Puenzo.
Martin Hertman's Shaved Head (1992) heralded the beginning of this shift, but the sly, mean gaze of Pablo Trappero's Half-Day Crane (1999), Daniel Bulman's Waiting for the Messiah (2000), and luquescia Martel's Swamp (2001) are the hallmarks of the wave of change.
Subsequent films show how the legacy of trauma has produced new ways to reimagine not only the past, but also the future. From Adrian Cateño's immersive Buenos Aires 1977 (2006) to Miragros Mumensal's fantastic Sisterhood (2011) and Benjamin Nester's satirical Red Eclipse (2018), the past has become both a structure for political discussion and a material for tantalizing fiction.
As seen in Lisandro Alonso's The Land of Comfort (2014) and Martel's Zama (2017), the study of Argentina's construction as a state based on colonial exploitation has become particularly prominent.
In fact, over the past 20 years, many of the most resonant films, such as Francesco Márquez's latest psychological thriller, Universal Crimes, have exposed the deep class inequalities that continue to affect Argentine society. An interesting LBGTIQ+ cinema has also appeared in films such as Marco Berg's Plan B (2009) and Lucio Castro's The End of the Century (2019).
The 10 films listed below give us a glimpse into the diversity of Argentine filmmaking in the 21st century. They demonstrate their game of game and formal boldness with genre films.
They also show a willingness to explore the boundaries between documentary and fiction, as well as the use of dramatic and self-referential metaphors as a way of exploring the nature of the film itself.
The Nine Queens (2000)
Director: Fabian Belinsky
Fabian Belinsky's debut film was filmed in free economic fall in the United States, and in a difficult robbery thriller, it linked capitalism and crime to a convincing effect. Ricardo Darling and Gaston Pauls (both brilliant) play two Buenos Aires crooks who conspire to defraud a collector by selling him a rare stamp, the nine queens in the movie's title.
Consider the collision of David Mamey's Casino (1987) and Very Suspect (1995), and you'll get an idea of Belinsky's elaborate multiple plot twists and narrative twists.
The film has been remade several times, including the Los Angeles-based Criminal (2004) and the Hindi film Bluff (2005) – neither of which has the sharpness and flamboyance of the original. Before his death in 2006, Belinsky made only one film, the plain Moment of Vertigo (2005).
The Blonde (2003)
Director: Albertina Cary
Albertina Cary's reaction to her parents' abduction and disappearance during the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 disrupted all documentary conventions. The person who told the story was not Cary herself, but an actor, a woman in her 20s who became her provocative alternative self.
Unlike traditional documentaries that deal with the memories of missing people, Cary doesn't have the quality of investigative evidence. The film abandons nostalgia for the past, and the film tends to focus more on the family moments that seem to touch the present in the past. Cary shows the moment of disappearance through an elaborate animated sequence in which a plastic spaceship swoops down from the air, taking her toy pig parents with them.
By transforming the missing into fictional characters, Blonde challenges the idea that the victim is defined by her family lineage. It's a cult film that reshapes the rules of cinema in the post-dictatorship era.
Magic Glove (2003)
Director: Martin Hertman
There is no better film than Martin Hertmann's Magic Glove in capturing the ripple effects of Argentina's turn-of-the-century economic crisis. This satirical black comedy consists of a group of eccentrics and unfolds in a series of comical sketches.
When the incompetent Buenos Aires taxi driver Alejandro stumbled upon a former alumnus, his life took a series of changes. He moved into the apartment of a former star, started a new relationship with a flight attendant, and decided to invest in a seemingly unreliable import project: magic gloves from China, from which the film's title comes.
Like his films Silvia (1999) and Two Shots (2014), Retman has a keen visual. In this absurd film, he depicts a country that has passed its best — a bit like Gabriel's dilapidated Renault 12 — but is determined to find a way to get rich quick.
The Headless Woman (2008)
Director: Luquesia Martel
Luquesia Martel is one of the main stylists of contemporary cinema, following The Virgin (2004) with the introduction of this existentialist drama. The wealthy Veronica (Maria Oneto's brilliant performance) suffers a seemingly minor car accident on a deserted provincial road.
After the accident, Veronica lost her way, wandering through her daily routine with an empty smile, as if trapped in a fish tank. While parents agreed to "take care" of the situation, erasing all traces of the accident, there was still something rotten. The viewer is immersed in Willow's hallucinatory consciousness.
Martel cleverly presents the viewer with a social reality built on the disappearance of inequality, injustice and often "covered up". The result is a truly captivating and daring original film that tells the story of sin, ghosts, complicity and obliteration. Its effects hover in Universal Crime.
Enigmatic Eyes (2009)
Director: Juan José Campanella
In 2015, Juan José Campanella's romantic and thriller was remade with a suspenseful murder as a clue. The film, which involves a pair of ill-fated lovers, parallel love stories and an interesting narrative twist spanning two time periods (1974 and 1999), is a compelling examination of historical memory, justice for the vigilante, and past trauma.
Ricardo Darling – Tom Hanks of the Argentine film industry – brilliantly plays a die-hard legal clerk who is haunted by the brutal rape and murder of a young, recently married female teacher. Unable to bring justice at the time, he revisited the case 25 years later in hopes of finding out what the perpetrators really were.
This is the second Argentine film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (Luis Puenzo's 1985 film The Official Statement was the first), and Enigmatic Eyes was not only a commercial success at home, with more than 2.4 million viewers, but also internationally, distributed in more than 75 countries.
Viola (2012)
Director: Mathias Pinheiro
The second of Matías Pinheiro's five "Shakespeare's Works" (a parody of Shakespeare's comedy), a bright and light-hearted study of the sense of repetition in contemporary life, is staged on the streets of Buenos Aires.
Pinheiro is the most articulate of Argentina's new wave of directors, cleverly adapting Twelfth Night's performances, gender politics and the vagaries of love themes into an engaging story that takes place between young actors and lovers that seems to be the fashionable venue of a boundless, never-ending city.
Viola was delivering for her boyfriend's DVD piracy business when she came into contact with an all-female troupe. She finds herself playing a role in the upcoming Twelfth Night, and elements of Merchant of Venice are mischievously added to it, disrupting the narrative of the story.
Pinheiro's films use abrupt close-ups that constantly shift the viewer's perspective, creating a sense of cunning surprise. Advocating a more flexible approach to art, gender, and sexuality, the film is an exhilarating mix of melodrama, witty romantic comedy, and philosophical intrigue, blurring the lines between film and theater.
Wild Tales (2014)
Director: Damian Szfron
In this hybrid film, Damien Szfron presents a story of six interrelated themes, depicting a society crumbling on the edge of the abyss, a very familiar routine in 21st-century Argentine cinema.
In all six stories, just one mundane trigger, a casual comment, a parking ticket, an instinctive gesture, becomes a catalyst for an emotional outburst that makes social norms disappear. From the road movie "The Strongest" to the revenge tragedy of the thrilling final episode", "Till Death", each story follows a different main line.
El Deseo is a production company owned by the Almodóvar brothers and a supporter of Martel Films, a co-production company of Szfron Films. It's a rollercoaster-like movie journey where each character pursues their own, often crazy journey of liberation.
Crime Family (2015)
Director: Pablo Trappero
Pablo Trappero addressed the idealism and hopes of the Villa Lugano neighborhood in Buenos Aires in 2012's White Elephant, which in turn tells the story of the infamous Puccio family who kidnapped four people for extortion between 1982 and 1985.
The story unfolds from the perspective of an aggressor, led by a middle-class patriarch who honed his skills by working for the Secret Service during the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983.
Trappero travels through different periods in the film with exciting shots, amplifying the high-pitched plot by using the repertoire of the 80s and the background music of the non-era. It's a cautionary tale of how those responsible for the crimes of authoritarian regimes gained immunity in democratic times to pursue terrorist regimes.
Theater of War (2018)
Director: Lola Arias
Theatre producer and musician Lola Arias, based on her 2016 theatrical work Minefield, made the film for the first time, bringing together six Falkland Islands war veterans to study the impact of conflict on their respective countries.
Set against a neutral white box space, the film represents a no-man's land in the Falkland Islands, where the men of the Falkland Islands return repeatedly during their dialogue. The film questions the documentary format as a way of constructing the official narrative.
These ex-combatants — including one of the 598 Gurkhas who fought for Britain in the conflict — found points of contact and insurmountable divisions. Their young stand-ins were deployed together, producing a powerful effect. Ultimately, creating a fluid space between documentary and fiction, Arias created a way for people to work toward different understandings of their past.
Flowers (2018)
Directed by: Mariano Linas
Filmmaking group El Pampero redefined Argentine cinema in the 21st century. Laura Citarella, Mariano Linas, Agustín Mendilaharzu and Alejo Mogilansky all worked in each other's films as director, editor, performer, writer and producer, with Mendilaharzu often serving as director of photography.
We could choose any of their films, from Citalella's Ostende (2011) to Mogilanski's Castro (2009), but the final selection was Linas' Flowers, a 13-hour epic film made for One of Argentina's most famous theater troupes, Pierre de Lava, also about the four actresses.
Flower is a film about the nature of cinema itself, encompassing a multitude of genres and styles—from B-movies, music, and transnational spy thrillers to mid-film, silent films, and exploratory narratives. Linas' ambitions are limitless, and the storyline takes the viewer across countries, languages, and different historical eras. It's a film that showcases El Pampero at its best, and it's also a bold, fun, and fascinating film.