Gonzalo Castro

A woman cooks while talking about different experiences of her life.

There are still some unlikely spaces in the cities.There is a house in Barcelona, in the Gràcia neighborhood, which has a garden full of trees and plants and in the background sculptures surrounded by tiles. María, a 35-year-old Argentinian, recently separated from her partner, and her daughter Isabel, a six-year-old Catalan who is starting school, live there through some black hole in the rents. They are visited by Iara, sister of one and aunt of the other, and several of their friends. As we watch María and Isabel interact with their loved ones, the film sensibly explores the interior and exterior spaces that make up those relationships.

The Argentine competition winner, Gonzalo Castro’s Invernadero (Winter House), offers a stylistically elegant if overlong contemplation of the experimental one-armed Mexican novelist Mario Bellatín, a famed prankster who here engages with his daughter and friends (all fictional characters) in an interrogation of biography (itself a central conceit in Bellatín’s fiction).

A sophisticated and hypnotic fiction with inlays of reality, a kind of literary Friends—the television series—or a costume party at Entropía, where the characters move through the Buenos Aires literary scene while playing at being others, trying on new connections. It is an experiment on discourse, roles, and settings, in which each sequence turns out to be more charming than the last. At times Resfriada seems like an expansion of the publishing house’s discourse, and at others an unexpected recess.

Dioramas chronicles the rehearsals of a small contemporary dance company (charged by choreographer Mario Pattin) in a vérité manner.