The Cinematheque

Winner of the Grand Prix of the International Competition at FIDMarseille 2018, Spanish artist Dora García’s staged documentary deploys psychoanalysis and performance art to recreate, in contemporary settings, the climate of uncertainty, hyper-vigilance, and paranoia caused by the traumatic ​“disappearances” of Argentina’s Dirty War (1974–1983). Seemingly disparate episodes, based on Happenings and literary works, are woven together by the acts of repetition and observation, and bound into a single film inspired by a key figure of the Argentinian avant-garde, Oscar Masotta, whose ideas on Lacanian psychoanalysis, politics, and art influenced the intellectual life of Buenos Aires from the 1950s until the 1970s, when it was all but stamped out by a brutal dictatorship.