A Useful Life

Federico Veiroj / Argentina, Uruguay / 2009 / 67 min
A useful life
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  • Academy Awards®

    Uruguay Submission for Best Foreign Film

  • San Sebastian International Film Festival

    New Directors Kutxa Award, Special Mention

  • BAFICI Buenos Aires Int'l Film Festival

    Best Actor

  • Warsaw International Film Festival

    Special Mention

  • Chicago Latino Film Festival

  • Miami International Film Festival

Spanish Film Club
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Spanish with English subtitles

With Jorge Jellinek, Manuel Martínez Carril, Paola Venditto

Synopsis

An art film enthusiast, Jorge fears that the decrease in theater attendance will force the Uruguayan Cinematheque to close. To save the theater, Jorge enters a new world where he is exposed to an unknown passion. Elegantly framed and brilliantly underrated, this is a universally attractive and loving tribute to the soul of cinema. A modern classic film.

About the Director

Federico Veiroj was born in 1976 in Montevideo, Uruguay. A film programmer turned director, he graduated in Media from UCUDAL. His debut feature film, Acné (2008), premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. Both this film and his second film, La vida útil (2010), have won more than 20 awards worldwide. In 2015, El Apóstata won the FIPRESCI Award and a Special Mention from the Jury at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. His fourth feature, Belmonte (2018), premiered in Toronto, just as Así habló el cambista (2019). Between 2015 and 2017, the Viennale, the Harvard Film Archive, and the Svenska Filminstitutet (Sweden) dedicated a showcase and retrospective to all his film work.

Press

“a moving, pawkily funny movie about the end of an era, not quite the death of cinema, but a change in public taste that makes a certain kind of serious, dedicated cinephilia a thing of the past.” – Philip French, The Guardian

“This lovingly photographed black- and-white effort is both a celebration of cinema and a heartwarming paean to the reality that beckons beyond it...Subtle and understated, A Useful Life consistently displays an appealing, sly wit. ” – Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter

“A deceptively straightforward parable lies at the heart of this tender and delicate film about the triangular relationship among the moviegoer, daily life and the cinema.” – The Harvard Film Archives

“Veiroj’s composition of the frame and his use of editing and mise-en-scène recall the filmmaking of the mid-twentieth century, somewhere between prewar classical style and the revolutions of the New Waves.” – The Harvard Film Archives

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