La hora de la siesta / Siesta

Showing at the Mar del Plata Film Festival: La hora de la siesta, directed by Sofía Mora

Synopsis from the film festival's website:

Dad is dead and mom has locked herself in her bedroom to cry and sleep; she doesn’t want to see anyone. Franca and her younger brother guard the door of the room so none of the annoying relatives assembled in their house in the middle of the afternoon can interrupt her solitary mourning. Afterwards, while waiting for the funeral, they wander around the neighborhood, perhaps in search of fresh air to clear their weary heads. Their conversations seem to lack continuity, marked by a combination of innocence and cynicism, always revolving around the same subject: to believe or not to believe. From faith (and religious fear) to conspirational paranoia (and the myths and superstitions supposedly created by “the Yankees”: the landing on the moon in 1969, the bad luck of Friday the 13th, friend’s day!), agnosticism and skepticism. Almost teenagers, they are just two somewhat lost brothers trying to deal with one certainty (death) and the doubts it has brought about. Sofía Mora’s first feature film captures this limbo with a special sensitivity, portraying the quiet anxiety and silent uneasiness of a hot and grey afternoon in the middle of the week. This daily yet strange situation depicts the hard pain of growing up, announcing, with a stifled scream, nothing less than the end of childhood.

Cinco días sin Nora / Nora's Will

Showing at the Mar del Plata Film Festival: Cinco días sin Nora, directed by Mariana Chenillo

Synopsis from the film festival's website:

The main character of this first work – which received the Best Director Award in the Festival of Moscow – is dead. Specifically, she committed suicide. A meticulously planned suicide, partly thanks to its timing: just before the Jewish festivity of Pesaj and during the holidays of her only son, a combination which forces Kurtz, Nora’s ex-husband, to take care of the corpse, the apartment and the funeral, which has to take place 5 days after the death. But Kurtz soon understands that these were precisely the woman’s intentions and is determined to sabotage the plans of this puppeteer from the beyond. Actor Fernando Luján is Jesus Kurtz, a grumpy man played in a deadpan tone (which resembles Jacobo, the main character from Whisky) and a recalcitrant atheist intent on sabotaging the retinue of the rabbi designated by Nora with small pranks, big insults and pepperoni pizzas. Virtually all of this black comedy about religion takes place indoors, which proves not only Chenillo´s talent to make the best use of spaces but also her ability to portray the way in which some secrets and true feelings echo sustainedly every time they appear, almost inadvertently, in the film.

Nothing Personal

Showing at the Mar del Plata Film Festival: Nothing Personal, directed by Urszula Antoniak

Synopsis from the festival's website:

A girl looks out the window of her apartment in Amsterdam. Her belongings are downstairs, on the street. All alone in the empty room, Anne -that’s her name- takes her ring off: this is the first scene of Nothing Personal and that’s all the information we’ll receive about Anne’s past because Antoniak´s first film focuses exclusively on Anne’s journey to faraway lands. The place chosen by Anne for her intimate exile is Connemara, an inhospitable district on the west coast of Ireland. We see her walking like an unsociable vagabond through the roads of this austere landscape, searching for food in the garbage and baring her teeth to those who try to disturb her solitude. But then she meets Martin, a widow who is much older than her but equally determined to defend his isolation. She agrees to work for him in exchange for food and something begins to change in Anne’s interior. Using very few dialogues and taking full advantage of the enigmatic beauty of the Irish landscape, Antoniak finds the precise tone and rhythm to portray Anne’s transformation and the chemistry between Rea (Neil Jordan’s fetish actor) and the fantastic actress Lotte Verbeek, the great discovery of Nothing Personal. When our contemporary world is busy with issues of unification and integration, the two characters of Nothing Personal choose a solitude they see as personal freedom and comfort. But isn’t they longing for human contact? What are the stages of coming together of two people? Nothing Personal is a cinematic experience asking and answering these questions.

The film's website is here.

Netflix It: A League of Their Own

#13: A League of Their Own

Available on Netflix: A League of Their Own, directed by Penny Marshall

Synopsis from AllMovie.com:

The All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League was founded in 1943, when most of the men of baseball-playing age were far away in Europe and Asia fighting World War II. The league flourished until after World War II, when, with the men's return, the league was consigned to oblivion. Director Penny Marshall and screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel re-create the wartime era when women's baseball looked to stand a good chance of sweeping the country. The story begins as a candy-bar tycoon enlists agents to scour the country to find women who could play ball. In the backwoods of Oregon, two sisters -- Dottie (Geena Davis) and Kit (Lori Petty) -- are discovered. Dottie can hit and catch, while Kit can throw a mean fastball. The girls come to Chicago to try out for the team with other prospects that include their soon-to-be-teammates Mae Mordabito (Madonna), Doris Murphy (Rosie O'Donnell), and Marla Hooch (Megan Cavanagh). The team's owner, Walter Harvey (Gary Marshall) needs someone to coach his team and he picks one-time home-run champion Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), who is now a broken-down alcoholic. After a few weeks of training, as Dugan sobers up, the team begins to show some promise. By the end of the season, the team has improved to the point where they are competing in the World Series (which is no big deal, since there are only four teams in the league).


There's no crying in baseball!

Carpani, Life and Works

Showing at the Mar del Plata Film Festival: Carpani, Life and Works, directed by Doris Carpani

Synopsis from the film festival's website:

Ricardo Carpani (obvious but necessary to say) was an artist who lived intentionally perceiving since adolescence, his transit through the planet. Knowing his work is to enter an overwhelming and consistent body of images among which unusual possibilities become intermingled. For example, a “porteño” (him) who reads the folded newspaper sustained in his left hand while he leans his shoulder on an elephant; or the surrounding forest with intermingling Indians, warriors, missionaries and the ineffable “carpaniana” zoology, or the Centaurs Gauchos, or series of lovers, or his honor in defense of the popular classes, or the shrill cries of anguish over the missing, or his murals in which the combat jumps of the canvas or the wall for us ... Critic Rafael Squirru considered Carpani´s work “transcendental.” And in another moment he said: “I have no doubt that Carpani has contacted his own cosmic force.” That view we fully share, appears in the film by his wife Doris and Jerónimo Carranza. The vital knowledge about the artist has turned into a film that, though it is, can not be regarded simply as a documentary work, because its resolution, the technique used and the precise effects make of this movie of about 90 minutes a reliable portrait and a great work of this author. Carpani was a man who took care of the destitute and downtrodden but not of the submissive. It is said that his figures seemed cut in stone. This must be the metaphor that corresponds to his oeuvre: “This work is indestructible.”

Netflix It: Dr. Dolittle

#12 - Dr. Dolittle

Available on Netflix: Dr. Doolittle, directed by Betty Thomas

Synopsis from AllMovie.com:

Betty Thomas directed this adaptation of the classic children's stories by Hugh Lofting (1886-1947), updating the original concepts into the present day. When noted surgeon Dr. John Dolittle (Eddie Murphy) swerves his car to avoid hitting a dog, he hits his head on the windshield, triggering his long-dormant gift for holding conversations with animals. Friends, associates and his wife Lisa (Kristen Wilson), all express concern, but Dr. Dolittle is happy as he takes on new animal clients. Soon Dolittle's clinic becomes a haven for talking rats, birds, and other assorted members of the animal kingdom, and Dolittle's new four-legged and furry friends, in turn, teach him a few things about being human. The effects seamlessly combine Jim Henson Creature Shop animatronics, computer graphics, and real animals, but some viewers might yearn for a return of the Great Pink Sea Snail and Lofting's other imaginative creatures.

Intangible Asset No. 82

Showing at the Mar del Plata Film Festival: Intangible Asset No. 82, directed by Emma Franz

Synopsis from the festival's website:

Australian Simon Barker, considered one of the best drummers of contemporary jazz, embarks on the search for mythical Kim Seok-chul, the South Korean witchdoctor whose elaborate improvised percussion sets have inspired his art and greatly influenced his ideas about music. The task isn’t easy: even though the Government has awarded him the distinction of “Intangible Asset” (a distinction this Asian country awards its cultural treasures), old Kim doesn’t participate in mundane affairs, and shuts himself away while officiating his intricate liturgy for the communion between the living and the dead. In this way, Barker´s journey becomes a mystical rather than a detective-like investigation; an initiation rite in which he must win the respect of the elusive master and run a race against time to finally find him a few days before his death. A journey through a stunning landscape of mountains, fields and small villages of the Korean rural areas, and a musical tale (that also includes other elements, like when Barker´s guide talks about the difficult times of the military regime) so amazing and different from Western stories, as to contain characters that have lived behind a waterfall for seven years learning to sing.