Vancouver Premiere

“Brilliant … An uncommon mix of stylistic rigour and feeling, The Currents [is] a work of impressive, at times thrilling, assurance from start to finish.”

Jon Frosch, The Hollywood Reporter

Milagros Mumenthaler’s first film in nearly a decade was the under-the-radar event of last year’s fall festival season. Since her Golden Leopard-winning debut Back to Stay (2011), Mumenthaler has fused prosaic experience—growing up, starting a family, and in The Currents, reaching the apex of a career—with thrillingly modernist mysteries of identity and knowability. Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), a Buenos Aires fashion designer, is in Geneva to accept an award. In an opening sequence as stunning and troubling in its use of perspective as Hitchcock’s Marnie or Bresson’s Une femme douce, we simultaneously follow and lose track of Lina’s whereabouts and state of mind. In the aftermath of this event, the narrative follows her aversions and compartmentalization, both through abstract projections and encounters with those who know her. Mumenthaler has cited Woolf’s capacity for shifts in consciousness as a guide; the film is tightly structured, nesting inexplicable acts within clear architecture.

In Spanish with English subtitles

“Played with mesmerizing opacity by González Sola, Lina takes her place alongside the inscrutable heroines of such films as Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967), Hermosillo’s The Passion According to Berenice (1976), Haynes’s Safe (1995), and, closer to home, Martel’s The Headless Woman (2008)—all alienated from their environments, all troubled for reasons that they are unable to fully explain.”

Lawrence Garcia, Reverse Shot
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