Two Shots Fired

U.S. Premiere

Q&A with director Martín Rejtman

The first feature in a decade by Martín Rejtman (The Magic Gloves), a founding figure of the new Argentine cinema, is an engrossing, digressive comedy with the weight of an existentialist novel. Sixteen-year-old Mariano (Rafael Federman), inexplicably and without warning, shoots himself twice—once in the stomach and once in the head—and improbably survives. As his family strains to protect Mariano from himself, his elder brother (Benjamín Coehlo) pursues a romance with a disaffected girl (Laura Paredes) who works the counter at a fast-food restaurant, his mother (Susana Pampin) impulsively takes off on a trip with a stranger, and Mariano recruits a young woman (Manuela Martelli) to join his medieval wind ensemble. Rejtman tells this story with both compassion and formal daring, pursuing one thread only to abandon it for another. Two Shots Fired is a wry, moving, consistently surprising film about the irrationality of emotions and how they govern our actions at each stage of our lives.