Avant l'effondrement
An anonymous letter triggers a desperate search for the truth in this drama from acclaimed author Alice Zeniter.
96'
France
IFFR 2023
Jorge Villafañez is a rotund, veteran private detective living alone in a high-rise apartment in Buenos Aires. Discreet and meticulous, he has a knack of making people open up in conversations. But when a new assignment puts him on the trail of Elvira, an experimental choreographer, the distance between the observer and the observed begins to collapse as Jorge descends into the rising waters of the Delta del Río de la Plata.
Adapted from Juan Sáenz Valiente’s eponymous comic book, Daniel Casabé and Edgardo Dieleke’s La Sudestada sets out like a riff on Vertigo (1958), but snakes like the Plata River to find its own path. Employing unusual edits, archival footage, surreal interludes, delightful genre shifts and passages of gestural abstraction, the film is a shape-shifting work that constantly reinvents itself and opens up into new directions.
Powered by a stellar lead performance by Juan Carrasco, La Sudestada endears us to Jorge even as it lets us glimpse his nastier side and horrific professional history. An unassuming reflection on age and urban loneliness, the film gradually accrues a spiritual dimension in the way it enables grace to manifest in a body fundamentally unprepared for it. The result is a thriller that tracks the movements of the soul.
– Srikanth Srinivasan
Daniel Casabé, Edgardo Dieleke
IFFR 2023
Programme IFFR 2023
A diverse competition bridging the gap between popular, classic and art house cinema. An expert audience jury picks the winner.
Read more about this programmeAn anonymous letter triggers a desperate search for the truth in this drama from acclaimed author Alice Zeniter.
96'
France
IFFR 2023
An unfolding reverie, haunting us with notions that make the real world seem fragile.
96'
Mexico
IFFR 2023
A tense psychological thriller turns into a coolly existentialist study on the limits of (com)passion.
98'
Denmark
IFFR 2023