Continuing our ongoing showcase of the work of Argentine film collective El Pampero Cine, we’re happy to host producer and filmmaker Laura Citarella in a special presentation of OSTENDE and TRENQUE LAUQUEN. Both starring Laura Paredes as a stranger in a small town in the Buenos Aires Province who finds herself embroiled in an ever-expanding web of mysteries, the two films are playful mirrors of each other that tease out new mysteries and resonances between themselves when seen together.
TRENQUE LAUQUEN
Dir. Laura Citarella, 2022
Argentina, 260 Minutes
In Spanish with English Subtitles
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7 – 5 PM – In person Q&A with Laura Citarella after the screening
One of the year’s best and most underappreciated films, Laura Citarella’s TRENQUE LAUQUEN is a marvel of low-budget ambition. Shot over the course of five years with the barest of means, the film is an epic mosaic of stories-within-stories that never abandons its simple, observational roots even as it pulls off ever-increasing feats of narrative dexterity. The second part in what is likely to become a series of films directed by Citarella and starring Laura Paredes, we’re happy to be showing the film in a double feature with its predecessor OSTENDE.
“A large-scale epic on a small-scale canvas, Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen (2023) is a brain-teaser of a film, a baroque shrine to the endless possibilities of storytelling that’s as focused on grand gestures of narrative dexterity as it is on observational studies of mundane details. At the core of the film is the mystery of a missing woman, Laura (Laura Paredes, also the film’s co-writer), and the attempts by her husband, Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd), and lover, Ezequiel (Ezequiel Pierri), to find her in the small town of Trenque Lauquen, Argentina. With clear nods to Antonioni (the first chapter is titled “La Aventura”) and Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) Trenque Lauquen weaves a metaphysical mystery on the fungibility of identity and the nature of storytelling itself.
A semi-sequel to—or perhaps remake of—Citarella’s earlier Ostende (2011), which also featured Laura Paredes listlessly wandering around a colorless small town in the Buenos Aires province, Trenque Lauquen carries over the paranoia, hazardous curiosity, and unstated romantic longing which defined the character of Laura in the previous film. A botanical researcher and radio host, the Laura of Trenque Lauquen is both the mysterious, absent center of the film and the jumping-off point from which the film’s myriad stories explode out. The closer the film brings us toward solving the mystery of Laura the further it also drags us into the labyrinthian tales that spin endlessly outward from her character: cryptic markings in library books leading to a secret trove of love letters; an eco-terrorist couple embroiled in a sci-fi conspiracy plot. The result is a head-spinning game that interrogates our desire for understanding and the fundamental fantasies underpinning storytelling.”
– Screen Slate
OSTENDE
Dir. Laura Citarella, 2011
Argentina, 85 minutes
In Spanish with English Subtitles
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7 – 10 PM – In-person intro with Laura Citarella before the screening
Thanks to a radio contest, a girl wins four vacation days in a huge hotel in Ostende, in the Buenos Aires province. It’s the low season, and she gets to the place alone. Her boyfriend will join her a few days later. On the beach there’s plenty of sun but also too much wind; and a not very sophisticated bar with a waiter that talks too much. In this place with no obligations or big attractions apart from a windy beach nearby and the not-so-tempting ocean, the girl starts to pay attention –maybe too much, maybe not enough– to the strange behavior of an old man who’s accompanied by two young women. Flirting with both Hitchcock and Rohmer from a light, feminine perspective, Laura Citrella demonstrates the entrancing possibilities of storytelling in her first film.