Para hacer una película solo hace falta un arma

When Santiago Sein retrieved a pile of film cans destined for the trash, he didn’t know that he’d saved a chapter of Argentinian film history forgotten by the books and forsaken by its participants: that of Córdoba’s amateur cinema in the heady 1960s and early 70s – cut short by the military junta. Film history relayed like an epic novel!

One day in late 2019, Santiago Sein picks up piles of film cans ready for the trash heap – without having the foggiest idea what they might contain. Most of the cans are unmarked, but one has a title which opens up possibilities for research. Soon, Sein starts to understand what he saved: (parts of) the Cinémathèque at the National University of Córdoba – films shot there in the 1960s and 70s by students. One of whom, Sein finds out, was Oscar Moreschi – his teacher at the film school.

When he tells him about the find, Moreschi’s immediate reaction is: this is not possible, this vanished as part of the military junta’s terror in the mid-1970s, just like so many of those who made the films, who more often than not, can actually be seen in them. Through the films he found, many of which were never finished, Sein sets out to reconstruct an era when so much seemed possible, narrate its story engagingly, in the style of a grand modernist novel. An important chapter of film history regained.

– Olaf Möller

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