Rojo

Benjamín Naishtat / Argentina, Brazil, France, Netherlands / 2018 / 109 min
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  • San Sebastián Int'l Film Festival

    Jury Prize, Best Cinematography

  • Argentinean Film Critics Association Awards

    Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor

  • Guadalajara Int'l Film Festival

    Best Actor

  • Toronto Int'l Film Festival

  • Rotterdam Int'l Film Festival

Spanish Film Club
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Synopsis

Spanish with English subtitles

With Darío Grandinetti, Andrea Frigerio, Alfredo Castro, Diego Cremonesi

What was the Argentinian mindset immediately preceding Jorge Videla’s right-wing military coup? Director Benjamín Naishtat’s darkly funny, highly stylish film immerses itself in Argentina’s collective subconscious in 1975, resulting in an x-ray image of madness and moral decline.

Set in an Argentinian provincial town, an unknown man and a crime unsettle the quiet life of a successful lawyer. It’s not that the lawyer committed the crime; rather, his looking the other way and doing nothing led to people dying.

Filmed in the style of 1970s crime dramas, Rojo can be seen as an absurd thriller and as a bitter analysis of the national indifference that led to Argentina suffering four consecutive military coups in 1976. As in Rojo, countless people disappeared in the desert, never to be seen again.

Related Subjects
About the Director
Benjamín Naishtat (1986, Argentina) is a writer, director, and editor. He graduated from film school in Buenos Aires in 2008. From 2009 to 2011 he took part in Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts Contemporains’ program in France. He has made a variety of commissioned films in Argentina and Cameroon. His work is shown internationally – his feature debut History of Fear (2014) world premiered in the Berlinale.  Rojo (2018) premiered in Toronto.
Press

“This subtly disturbing, queasily tense satirical nightmare from 33-year-old Argentinian filmmaker Benjamín Naishtat answers that question with a story of group neurosis and complicit wretchedness. He shows that, for those left behind, what also gradually disappeared was their peace of mind, their self-respect and their ability to communicate what was happening or how they felt: an uncanny, insidious erosion of self.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“It’s a brutal trip, though Naishtat smartly balances the heaviness with moments of levity and absurd comedy. Some much-welcome relief is provided by the wonderful Chilean actor Alfredo Castro, a familiar presence in the movies of Pablo Larraín, whose influence is evident here.” – Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Notes on the Film

“Researching Rojo was easy because many of the stories are from my family. My grandparents and my father were visiting the city of Córdoba in 1975; they were leftist militants, and my grandmother was a prominent union lawyer. She disappeared into a secret prison, and her house, my family’s house, was torched. My father escaped before a commando unit came to his house, and he had to flee. He lived 10 years in exile, which is how he met my mother, in Paris—another exile. Some of the pictures in the house are from my family.

I was working on this for about five years. It changed a lot in development. It’s a relatively expensive film, so it took a long time to get the money together. It’s about the Dirty War but it has its little comment on the present day, of course—people being zombies in the context of things happening around them. Of course, it applies to Argentina but to other places as well.”

– Benjamin Naishtat, Director

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