On the occasion of the publication of her new collection of film criticism, The Hunger: Film Writing, 2012-2024 (available now from Film Desk Books), FLC hosts the writer Melissa Anderson for a very special screening of Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen (2022), with Anderson signing books before and after the screening and during the film’s intermission.

Trenque Lauquen
Laura Citarella, 2022, Argentina, 262m (presented in two parts with 50-minute intermission)
Spanish with English subtitles

In her dazzling and enormously pleasurable opus, Laura Citarella takes viewers on a limitless, mercurial journey through stories nested within stories set in and around the Argentinean city of Trenque Lauquen (“Round Lake”) and centered on the strange disappearance of a local academic named Laura (Laura Paredes). Through initial inquiries by two colleagues—older boyfriend Rafael and a driver named Ezequiel with whom Laura had grown secretly close—we learn about her recent discoveries, including a new, unclassified species of flower and a series of old love letters hidden at the local library, which may help track her down. Yet as flashbacks and anecdotes pile up, we—and the film’s intrepid investigators—begin to realize that this intricately structured tale is larger and stranger than we could have imagined. Citarella, a producer of the equally remarkable shape-shifting epic La Flor, has confidently crafted a series of interlocked romantic, biological, and ecological mysteries that create parallels between past lives and present dangers, invoke the rapture of obsessive pursuit, and salute the human need to find personal freedom and happiness. Trenque Lauquen is told in 12 chapters spread across two feature films. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. A Cinema Guild release.