Sounds Like Music: The Films of Martín Rejtman
May 13 – 19
With Rapado, his 1992 debut feature, Martín Rejtman single-handedly revitalized Argentine narrative film. The five movies he’s made since—including his poker-faced new work Two Shots Fired, receiving a one-week run as part of this retrospective—are models of stylistic precision, narrative structure, and comic pacing. From his early studies of young people drifting in and out of financial solvency (Silvia Prieto, The Magic Gloves) to his recent excursions into nonfiction (Copacabana) and hybrid filmmaking (Elementary Training for Actors, co-directed with the playwright Federico Léon), Rejtman has developed a canny, wholly original serio-comic voice. Romantic confusion, investment troubles, unemployment, youthful aimlessness, the numbing rush of city life, and the revivifying power of music and dance: in Rejtman’s movies, the business of modern urban living—and specifically, of living in Argentina during the country’s millennial economic crisis—comes off as both familiar and thrillingly strange. Programmed by Dennis Lim with Isa Cucinotta.
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CANDIDATE, THE
Title: CANDIDATE, THE ¥ Pers: REDFORD, ROBERT ¥ Year: 1972 ¥ Dir: RITCHIE, MICHAEL ¥ Ref: CAN007AP ¥ Credit: [ WARNER BROS / THE KOBAL COLLECTION ]…
Elementary Training for Actors
Co-directed with the playwright Federico León, Rejtman’s hilarious, whip-smart reconstruction of an experimental children’s acting workshop has a manic, irrepressible energy new to his work. Screening with Copacabana
The Magic Gloves
Following the crisscrossed fortunes of several characters in recession-plagued urban Argentina, Rejtman’s comic masterpiece is suffused with a terse, prickly sympathy for its heroes, and alive to the mystery and charm of the modern world. <span style="font-size: 12px;">Screening with Doli Goes Home (1986, 30m).
Rapado
The debut feature by Rejtman, which helped launch a new wave of Argentine filmmakers, is a perfect introduction to the director’s droll, shaggy-dog comic sensibility—and one of the great modern cinematic studies of youthful aimlessness.
Silvia Prieto
Rejtman’s radiant second feature, which follows a young woman through a short, precarious stretch of her life in Buenos Aires, is a comedy of oddball details and occasional, quiet epiphanies.
Two Shots Fired
One-week exclusive run
Martín Rejtman’s first feature in a decade, about a family’s curious methods of coping with the youngest teenage son’s inexplicable suicide attempt, is an engrossing, digressive comedy with the weight of an existentialist novel. An NYFF52 selection.
