David Oubiña

In 1969 Argentine filmmaker Hugo Santiago directed Invasión, his opera prima, written by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and later settled in France. This film documents his return to Buenos Aires in 2013 to shoot his latest film, Le ciel du centaure.


Isolated in his apartment, old and forgotten by almost everyone —whom, in turn, he has also forgotten— Rafael occupies the hours of his daily life with various rituals and repetitions.

An actress and her director are filming a movie. Through various texts ranging from monologues by Brecht and Joyce to tango songs by Libertad Lamarque, the film reflects on actors and acting in cinema.

Forensic anthropologists use laser technology to search for clandestine graves of the dictatorship in the scrubland. Valeria, the daughter of disappeared people, coordinates the search. Otilia, Mother of Plaza de Mayo, awaits news of the past.

Argentina, the 70’s. One morning, several armed young men, dressed in military uniform, kidnap a Senior Army General and hide him in a modest cottage. There, without the hostage’s awareness of either the reason for his imprisonment or the people who planned it, the young kidnappers subject him to summary trial. In subsequent days, the military man will respond to an interrogation as severe as precise, that will lay bare the tense contradiction between two political and moral ideologies so incompatible that destruction surely awaits one of the opposite fields. The ending unveils a new chapter of a contemporary drama.

No description available.

A film about the Argentine opera

Argentine helmer Rafael Filipelli's understated and deliberate, slice-of-life drama Night Music (AKA Musica Nocturna, 2007) unfurls over the course of four evenings, with its depiction of an emotionally-strained marriage between husband and wife Federico (Enrique Pineyro) and Cecilia (Silvia Arazi), which Filipelli sets against the backdrop of semi-vacant, nocturnal Buenos Aires. He is a music critic pushing 50 and grappling with the completion of his first book; she is a playwright, in rehearsals for a major new production. Both have hit an emotional lull in their marriage that inspires each to coolly flirt with infidelity. As Federico flirts dangerously with the theatrical director's assistant, Cecilia reconnects at length with a past acquaintance, belletrist Sergio (Horacio Acosta), who may or may not have been amorously involved with Cecilia at one time.

Hugo Santiago discusses the process of writing with Jorge Luis Borges the screenplay for the film Invasión (1969).

No description available.

An inquiry into film criticism in Argentina framed inside the historical debate about film ontology