Manuel Embalse

This fully archival journey through the 35 years of Alfredo Stroessner’s regime in Paraguay reveals unseen footage and explores one of the longest-running dictatorships in history, whose effects still resonate today.

Argentina, 1968. In the midst of the Cold War, the dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía (1966-70) organizes the 9th Mar del Plata Film Festival in order to show the world its friendly face, while exercising censorship and repressing dissidence.

Using footage filmed in Peru in 1950 by a foreigner, Víctor writes a letter to his son to question the country he will inherit: among heartbeats and ruins, he searches for a hope that still endures amid disillusionment.

In a country where the consumption of meat is prohibited, a group of vegans face off against the last resistance of barbecue lovers.

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After collecting multiple records related to a painful family tragedy, Victor dives into the archive in search of answers about what really happened on January 26, 1983

There is a monster in Lake Nahuel Huapi. At twilight, it spreads across the surface of the water like a taut cowhide, grabbing its victims with sharp claws. Another monster also lurks around the lake, near Bariloche, in the Argentine Andes.

The Antes Muerto Cine collective presents an episodic film about nature, technology, politics, violence and affection; about times past and times to come, from the noisy, angry, rebellious present. Rather be dead than policemen, than defeated, than...

The first films of Patagonia - where I grew up - show a territory that no longer exists, as the araucarias, millenary trees from the Patagonian forests, were in part replaced by more productive pines. Near my new home, in Belgium, I find araucarias that adorn front gardens. We hear some girls playing in the car, pointing out araucarias on the road. How did these plants become a petty-bourgeois fashion in northern Europe? I confront these archives with contemporary technoscientific images, used by a lab to explore plant modifications. What can these modes of representation tell us about our time?

A look back at the murder of a teenager by the Buenos Aires police, through the words of his mother and her obsessive observation of the place of his forced disappearance.

A group of young writers, entangled in their relationships, argue about success, love, and death. The night's tide brings to light what was previously hidden and some weaknesses.

At the end of the 1960s, Argentine artist Leandro Katz participated in “Theatre of the Ridiculous”, an eccentric group linked to New York’s queer underground. This film-essay moves between archives, testimonies, and spectres of the past that question the present. Photography, film, video, and sound intertwine to approach, if only in brief flashes, that mythical past and raise questions about time, art, sexuality, death, and cinema.

I travel around Sweden listening to the tapes recorded by my parents 40 years ago, when they fled the Argentine dictatorship. Has the revolutionary fire that animated them been extinguished in Swedish comfort? I chat with my father, looking for ghostly images, created from family memories. There are traces that give us a glimpse of another possible world."

Authorities have prohibited access to a forest on the outskirts of the city. Strange vegetation has infested the area, and those who have been questioned report sightings of rare species, human-sized birds, or figures that appear and disappear. Despite the restrictions, several people decide to visit the place. Once there, they coexist and play without fear of the warnings. Little by little, reality begins to distort, blending with their memories, dreams, and fantasies.

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A ship is shipwrecked on a desert island in the Río de la Plata. One of the crew, without name or age, wanders through the ruins of a city project that was not. The voices of the original spirits guide him through the territory, making the formation of the Argentine State emerge from the shadows, in the years of the Conquest of the Desert. How to find in the roots of the trees the memory of a place?

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The filmmaker decides to make a film in an attempt to remember a dream from his notes: at the crossroads of essay and diary, the film offers a sensitive investigation into the relationship between dreams, animals and the city.

Juan and Luciano find out some girls are staying in the neighboring house and decide to spy on them. The girls play hide and seek and start changing. When they realize they are being watched, they will try to capture the boys.

According to the myth still in force in the coal towns of Patagonia, if a woman enters a mine, the earth becomes jealous. Then, there’s collapse and death. Shady River starts from a dark personal experience to transform in a film about the silence of women who live in men's villages. How to film where our presence is prohibited? How to record the resonances of what doesn’t sound? As the fog and smoke from the power plant cover the town, the voices of the women of Shady River force their way between the white of the ice and the hum of the drilling machines, until blowing up the structure of silence.