Ronda nocturna

For the first time in years, Cozarinsky shot a feature in his homeland Argentina, precisely in a period of social humiliation and economic upheaval. Ronda nocturna is a sensitive, occasionally dreamy odyssey through night-time Buenos Aires. The ‘people of the day’ have gone home, the night people take over the street. It is All Hallows in the southern hemisphere and Buenos Aires cools off after a warm spring day; the camera roams the streets and tarries by 19-year-old Victor, convincingly played by the television star Gonzalo Heredia in his first real film role. Victor comes from the countryside and works as a male prostitute and small-time dealer. The film follows him on his rounds through the night. He meets a police detective who has sex with him in exchange for ‘protection’, he comes across junkies looking for an extra shot, is introduced in a chic sauna, finds himself at an eccentric diplomatic reception and meets a taxi driver who has inherited money from a customer. Cozarinsky sketches a stirring and realistic portrait of nocturnal lodgers in his romantic and threatening home city. Slowly, irrational and worrisome issues come to the surface. Victor sees a man pushed under a truck and is himself a victim of violence. When he meets a forgotten girlfriend from the countryside, it slowly starts to dawn on him… (GT)