“A child can only play a child,” insists the charismatic acting teacher at the center of Rejtman’s uproarious, whip-smart fiction-nonfiction hybrid film. Elementary Training for Actors, co-directed with the playwright Federico León, is a study of an experimental acting workshop for children aged 8 to 12. One girl performs the act of waiting for a kettle to boil; another has to take time out for acting, as her severe instructor would have it, too much; a pair of students reenact a class discussion word for word. The heart of the movie is Fabián Arenillas, who—as the workshop’s teacher—gives the movie a manic, irrepressible energy new to Rejtman’s body of work.

Screening with:

Copacabana
Martín Rejtman, Argentina, 2006, HDCAM, 58m
Spanish with English subtitles
After completing his loose trilogy of movies set among Buenos Aires’ young, aimless working middle class, Rejtman turned to nonfiction. For Copacabana, he set his sights on a more marginalized Buenos Aires social group: the city’s large community of Bolivian immigrants. Rejtman contrasts the weekday drudgery of these underacknowledged members of Argentina’s urban population with the exuberant, intricately synchronized group dances they practice and perform for the feast day of the Virgin of Copacabana. The result is a moving, attentive study of a culture at once near to and far from the one on display in Rejtman’s previous films.