The Faith of the Volcano

La fé del volcán is an affectionately made, simple film about the special relationship between the imaginative scissor sharpener Danilo and the young girl Annie, both trying to survive in a large Argentinean city. Annie is assistant in a hairdressers and Danilo travels the streets on his bike – with an ingenious built-in sharpening kit – looking for customers. The lighter moments in their existence are their regular meetings with each other, characterised by Danilo’s verbose, occasionally melancholy, sometimes bitter reflections on work, politics and life in general.Until recently there was no place in Argentine film for women directors. Ana Poliak, together with e.g. Lucrecia Martel, is an exponent of a wave of independent film-makers who manage to work in the still largely macho film world. Immediately after her feature début ¡Qué vivan los crotos!, Poliak started on this sequel, for which she received a grant from the Hubert Bals Fund. La fé del volcán is a hopeful film about passion in a world filled with pain and is about people who manage to maintain their humanity despite their everyday confrontations with setbacks, poverty and violence.