EXTRAORDINARY STORIES
(HISTORIA EXTRAORDINARIAS)
dir. Mariano Llinas, 2008
242 mins. Argentina.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12 – 5PM

Co-presented with Cinema Tropical.

As though it was a sort of encyclopedia of adventure fiction, this film takes as a start three classically used triggers. One: A man who gets accidentally involved in a case of assassination; Two: another man (a small-town bureaucrat) who gets obsessed with another man, whose life becomes an increasingly problematic riddle; Three: A Jules Verne styled challenge takes place in a sort of gentlemen club in the deep argentine country side; that challenge ( a remotely scientific orientated challenge) involves a third man in an unexpected odyssey down a river that run through the lonely plains. Those triggers (that, following Borges path, combine the universe of Stevenson and the universe of the pampas) craft a complex and surreal plot, a plot that somehow includes, in the same argentine universe, explosions that take place for no one in the middle of the plains, forsaken lions that die in forsaken buildings, remote world war II stories, stories of love and glory, stories of brilliant men and of forgotten men, and those of men both brilliant and forgotten. Hundreds of stories, altogether in a plot that, more than a film, become a sort of essay about fiction: How fiction works, where does fiction come from and what the real purpose of fiction is.