Río de la Plata
The programmer's note
Not out yet. It arrives on the eleventh of September and we are telling you now so you can clear an evening for it. Ferreyra made La Siesta, ten minutes of heat and silence, and this is the same eye at feature length on water. Watch the survey scenes, which she films as procedure and never as metaphor, and then notice how much of the marriage is carried in numbers being read aloud. Ninety-one minutes, in Spanish. Ines Salgado came down to cut it.
The film
The Río de la Plata silts up. Keeping the channel to Buenos Aires open takes constant measurement and constant dredging, and the two are done by people who have to agree with each other. Élida has surveyed the estuary for the port authority for twenty years. She knows where the bars form, which ones move in a season, and which ones the pilots lie about. The autumn survey puts her aboard the Yaguareté for six weeks. Its master is Ruben, to whom she was married for nine years and from whom she has been carefully separated for six. Ferreyra sets a romance inside a job that cannot be paused: the survey runs to a schedule, the dredge runs to a schedule, and neither of them can walk out of a conversation on a hundred metre vessel. The film is patient, funny in short bursts, and unusually interested in what two people who were good at working together do with the fact that they were bad at everything else.
- The autumn survey
- Aboard the Yaguareté
- Bar seventeen
- Week four
- The channel
Credits
- Lucía Ferreyra
- Lucía Ferreyra
- Nadine Zorrilla
- Ines Salgado
- Bruno Cattaneo
- Malena Ruiz Otero
- Ezequiel Prat
Stills
Discussion
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