Argentina,
2003, 87 min
Shown in 2003
CREDITS
- dir
-
Santiago Loza
- prod
-
Santiago Loza, Francesca Feder
- scr
-
Santiago Loza
- cam
-
Willi Behnisch
- editor
-
Ana Poliak
- cast
-
Julio Chávez, Valería Bertucelli, Chunchuna Villafañe, Raquel Albéniz, Eva Bianco
- source
-
Bavaria Film International, Bavariafilmplatz 8, Geiselgasteig D-82031, Germany. FAX: 49-89-6499-3720. EMAIL: Bavaria.international@bavaria-film.de
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Skyy Prize contender. Santiago Loza in person.
OTHER
Winner of this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival’s prestigious Tiger Award, Santiago Loza’s Extraño is a film “of cautious words, of a fragile silence,” as the director Loza states, avoiding actions and dialogue to instead focus on the phantoms within souls, where silence is the norm and its disquiets imperceptible. No fisticuffs, strip clubs or other flights of machismo (the film’s token “rave” scene, in fact, is one of the truest visions yet of utter solitude); Loza instead presents a man—and a nation—going wrong quietly, a collapse of the interior more attention-grabbing than any outward scream. Extraño continues Argentina’s film renaissance with remarkable confidence, surrounding its emotionally isolated, disquieted hero with moments as delicate as a whisper, and generating in the fragile silences an aura more defining than words. Axel is a fortyish doctor who’s given up his practice, and, it seems, everything else about life; rarely speaking or spoken to, he lives with his sister and her children, and in a local bar. A chance meeting with a pregnant, much younger woman leads to a relationship based more on mutual resignation than apparent love; even after moving in with her Axel still seems ready to disintegrate at any moment, like a shadow caught without a sun.
—Jason Sanders
FACTOID #51
The first silent film screened at the Festival (now an annual tradition) was The Scarlet Letter (1924) by the great Swedish director Victor Sjöström, on October 24, 1968. The film’s star, Lillian Gish, was honored with an in-person tribute two days later.
