Un Puma

This comedy of errors revolves around a hapless 30-year-old named Arturo. His penchant for indiscretions is as impossible to overlook as the finesse with which the film glides from March 2020 to the preceding decade and back again.

Different groups of people wander in a rainy, windy, dark world. They spend time together, trying to get away from their depressing jobs, meandering constantly towards a disturbing surreal queer fantasy.

Buenos Aires. Exe, 25 years old, has just lost his job and is not looking for another one. His neighbors and friends seem as odd to him as they always do. Online, he meets Alf, a boy from Mozambique who is also bored with his job and who is about to follow Archie, another boy who has run away into the jungle. Through the dense vegetation of the forest, Archie tracks ants back to their nest. One of them wanders off course and comes across Canh, a Filipino, sitting on top of a giant heap of earth and who is about to go back to his strange, beautiful home town, where he too has a miserable job.

After the attack on Charlie Hebdo's office in Paris, Ivan, the frivolous son of a prominent Argentine journalist, embarks on a journey pursuing different geopolitical events around the world.

Federico, in his mid-20s, lives alone in Buenos Aires. The day his grandmother dies, he decides to part with his girlfriend. He fears hurting her. However, she is laid-back, feisty and not even close to feeling hurt. He begins obsessing over her unexpected reaction—but then he meets someone else.

One night seven years ago, Rafael came home after work and discovered that people he did not know had come looking for him. He immediately fled, without looking back. From that moment on, his life changed, as if that night had never ended. One evening, around an improvised fire near a factory, he decides to confide his journey to a stranger. Rafael’s intimate account meets the collective testimony of an entire nation oppressed by poverty, police repression and institutional corruption.

Dealing with a series of increasingly absurd situations and relationships, recently separated yoga instructors Gustavo and Vanesa are finding it difficult to live apart. Their challenges include meddling mothers, amnesiac students, and burgeoning romances. Step by step, they find their way back to the practice.

Buildings are not supposed to move. But on Avenida Libertador 2050, a building moves and the ceiling shivers, causing a strange nausea that devours its residents. Those who live on the top are afraid they’ll fall, the ones who live beneath are afraid they’ll drown.

Ten-year-old Axel lives with his mother and three sisters in a flat in Buenos Aires. They’d be a perfectly normal family if only the mother weren't imprisoned in one of the rooms.

The accident leads a group of young boys from the high roofs of their neighborhood, passing through its destruction, to the deepest of the earth.

Henrique lives alone in the mountains in Portugal. Having his children been taken away by the social services, one day he searches for the psychologist in charge of the process to get some sort of vengeance. From then on, he hides in the forest for several days, trying nothing but to survive.

In Argentina, the majority of delivery drivers working for local UberEats clone apps are Venezuelans who have fled the crisis ravaging their country. Filmed during the pandemic in Buenos Aires, Caracas and Colonia Tovar, Riders forcefully immerses us in the gruelling daily lives of those exploited by the platform economy at both ends of South America.

There is a monster in Lake Nahuel Huapi. At twilight, it spreads across the surface of the water like a taut cowhide, grabbing its victims with sharp claws. Another monster also lurks around the lake, near Bariloche, in the Argentine Andes.

Like a playlist, there are songs, there are questions, there is an anniversary and a boy who misses another. There are many more things that appear in a linear way but that, in practice, take place all at once-all the time and shape the idea of something greater.

At the beginning, an objet trouvé: a video camera bought by the director at an online auction site during an extended visit to the south of France to see his girlfriend at the end of 2019. His voiceover explains that he found some footage still stored on the camera and wants to use it to make something for cinema. To do this, he has to obtain permission from the camera’s previous owner, an older man named Charles, who lives in Arles. As the rhyme already suggests, imagination could be at play here.

Sometimes we find ourselves walking, talking or simply looking at things. That is what the protagonists of this film do. However, inside this mystery of life, we don’t know who they are or what they do. Teddy Williams builds yet again a dense and fantasmatic universe where breezes rhyme with vacancies and to the verb to be has its full double meaning. (M. V.)