TIE YOUR PLOUGH TO A STAR
(ATA TU ARADO A UNA ESTRELLA)
Dir. Carmen Guarini, 2017
Argentina. 82 minutes.
In Spanish with English subtitles.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13 – 10 PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 25 – 5 PM
“I’m a phantasmagoria. You people are inventing me, I barely exist anymore. I haven’t existed for the last five years. I live because of false projections. I’m very glad that you think I’m with you people. When you leave here, I act like I go to my room. I close the door and disappear. I reappear when Carmen knocks on the door and I reconstruct myself.”
After some time off, we decided to put a cherry on top of our near-complete Fernando Birri retrospective (COSMIC, RAVING, LUMPEN CINEMA) with this documentary by Carmen Guarini, who shot Birri’s return to Argentina (as well as the Higuera commune in Bolivia) in 1997, to mark the 30th anniversary of Che Guevara’s murder. TIE YOUR PLOUGH TO A STAR is structured around that visitation which, necessarily, uncorks many juicy anecdotes about the turbulent 60s and 70s heyday of Third Cinema, alongside invaluable glimpses of Birri’s practice as a thinker (utterly unafraid of then-burgeoning digital technology) and his eternal quest for answers to one nagging question: What is utopia? Guarini stitches it together with a wide-ranging interview conducted with Birri two decades later, just before his death in December 2017. The result is a loving portrait of a restless mind and a titan of Latin American cinema, as well as invaluable testimony to Birri’s influence as an unclassifiable theorist, educator and filmmaker.
CARMEN GUARINI is a veteran filmmaker and anthropologist, as well as the founder of DOCUBUENOSAIRES Festival and Forum (est. 2001) as well as the pioneering Argentine documentary production house CINE OJO (est. 1987), cofounded with Marcelo Céspedes. She teaches at University of Buenos Aires and the University of Cinema (FUC) as well as the EICTV-Cuba. She has participated in seminars with Jorge Preloran, Fernando Birri and Jean-Louis Commoli. Her other films include (but are not limited to) HOSPITAL BORDA, A CALL TO REASON (1986), THE ETERNAL NIGHT (1990), THE VOICE OF THE HANDKERCHIEFS (1992), RED INK (1998), THE DEVIL AMONG THE FLOWERS (2005) and STREETS OF MEMORY (2013).