Article by: Alisa Marghella

Translation by: Giulia Magazzù

After Pude ver a puma, Eduardo Williams comes back to the TFF with another short film, Tôi quên rôi – I forgot!, which preceded the screening of The huella en la niebla.

With Tôi quên rôi – I forgot!, the young Argentine director proposes a longer film (maybe too long, since it had to precede the next film). It is a twenty-six minute movie that  discontinuously portraits the anonymous lives of some guys who spend their days between work, hanging out and parkour. He portraits a fragmented generation, ready to jump from one roof to another, who lives in a suspended reality.

In the director’s words, «This film came to me as an opportunity to locate myself in the hypothetical place that I prefer when I direct or watch a movie, or far from any certainty. I always try to get lost in these experiences, in order to generate a vacuum that gives me the opportunity to exceed my limits». The picture that emerges is that of an unnerved and unnerving everyday life, exasperated by the use of hand-held cameras. The plot is too incomplete and the photography annoying, except for the last shot that clarifies to the viewer the sense of the fragmentary nature of the scenes.

La huella en la niebla is certainly a more pleasant movie. Directed by another Argentine director, Emiliano Grieco, it tells the story of Elias, a wounded man who returns to his island in order to rebuild his life. The wound, however, does not heal, and despite his efforts the fog ends up swallowing him.

Grieco does not employ a real actor, but a fisherman. He uses no dialogues at all, but water looks like the real star of the film. Considered as the conclusion of the documentary The Son of the River, the first work of the young director, this film lies somewhere between the great stories of Dickens and Conrad and documentary, making a good use of photography. The contrast between in focus and out of focus images serves as a narrative liaison, allowing the director to take advantage of the suggestions offered by the landscape to describe the emotions of a man trying (to no avail) to find traces of the past through the river. Overall, though, the narrative results are extremely “confusing” and the goal of placing the character in an interior limbo, unfortunately, leaves the viewer in that limbo too.