2023 North Carolina Latin American Film Festival
Trenque Lauquen
(Laura Citarella, 2022, Pt 1: 128 minutes | Pt 2: 132 minutes, Argentina, Spanish w/ English subtitles, DCP)
From El Pampero Cine, the collective behind La Flor, comes a labyrinthine tale of obsessive pursuit and the quest for personal freedom.
The search for a missing woman unspools in two unexpectedly interconnected parts in Laura Citarella’s playful new feature. The missing woman is Laura (Laura Paredes), a biologist cataloging plant species in and around the Argentinean city of Trenque Lauquen. The men searching for her: Rafael, her boyfriend, and Ezequiel, a coworker who has come to mean more to her in recent days. But in order to uncover the truth of Laura’s disappearance, a profusion of mysteries must be explored. There’s the question of love letters hidden in books in the local library, the discovery of a new species of flower, and then there’s the mysterious being, rumored to be haunting the lake at the center of town.
“[A] quiet, effortless enchantment that finds the extraordinary in the ordinary.” – Spectrum Culture
“Many artists have taken similarly postmodern notions of an impossible truth into realms of despair and madness, but Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes, of losing oneself as the catalyst for realizing no one has a set, permanent self to lose in the first place.” – Jake Cole, Slant Magazine
