rgentinian films, Historias Minimus (Minimal Stories) and Caja Negra (Black Box), directed by Carlos Sorin and Luis Ortega respectively, have won the Grand Prix and the Special Jury Award at the 17th Fribourg International Film Festival held between March 16 and 23 at Fribourg, Switzerland. While Carlos Sorin and his producer got citations besides 20,000 Swiss Francs and 10,000 Swiss Francs each for Minimal Stories, Luis Ortega and his producer received citations and 10,000 Swiss Francs each respectively.
The awards were decided by an international jury consisting of Licinio Azevedo, a filmmaker from Mozambique, Pradip Biswas, a film critic and author from India, Tatiana Gaviola, a Chilean director, French film scholar Jean Loup Passek and Kate Reidy, director, underground films, Switzerland.
Martial Knaebel, artistic director of the Fribourg International Film Festival asserted,”We are happy that the awards have gone to directors of Latin American countries like Argentina that is still seeking a new language in cinema with a rare passion.”
Minimal Stories interweaves three stories focusing on three characters who take a journey to San Julian with different dreams and ideas. In the first tale, old Don Justo, a fugitive, is looking for Malacara, his favourite dog who had disappeared several years ago. In the second narrative Roberto, a solitary, travelling salesman, is in search of the most beautiful birthday cake for Reme, the son of a widow with whom he is in love. In the third episode the director offers the quaint tale of Maria Flores, a shy young woman who is travelling as part of a television contest to win electrical appliances.
The director offers viewers a space of time in Patagonia that does not go by as it does elsewhere. The roads wind endlessly and on the roadside one is confronted with mini-fragmented stories that never cross each other or have a common tryst. According to Carlos Sorin the film is something like “a road movie” if we are not afraid of minimising its poetry or “small miracles”. Each character takes a journey, sometimes assuming the form of reverie or the magic of poetry, to reach their goal. The certitude at the end of the road is that illusions are no better than our lives, carrying a subtext reflecting on one’s journey of the soul.
The citation of the jury members mentions: “The jury has decided to reward the director’s tender and empathetic portrayal of the people we see. A poetic film in which the stories’ very simplicity becomes a cinematographic device.”
Luis Ortega’s film Black Box is quite literally “a mute journey” of a beautiful 17-year old girl Dorotea whose miniature world consists of her 100-year-old grandma and her skinny retarded father. Dorotea in her own way tries to accommodate these two marginal persona, her own life riddled with solitude and solicitude. Black Box is a tale of pathos and personal pain, with time standing at the cross-roads as three lives count their time with a hope so fragile, brittle and bleak.
Says the director Luis Ortega, “The Black Box speaks of the difficulty of being with other individuals as well as the fear of being alone; the desperate need we all have to break away one day from the alienation that separates us from the world and from others. The film speaks of a soul enclosed in his black box, a coffin for the living. It speaks of the death we await without knowing more about it. And the way in which love can be transmuted in its abundance, without effort, without words, simply by being there”.
Luis Ortega who was overwhelmed by the success of the film, claims that he wanted to show the constant explosions of beauty that this existence produces by opening the black box and reuniting the solitary souls.
The citation of jury members describes the film as “a beautifully silent tour around the living personifications of old age, loneliness and compassion”. The members go on to add, “With great sensitivity, the director shows us a simple world made up of glances and gentle movements of fragile people; at the border of fiction and reality.”
The Special Jury Award is a cash prize of 5,000 Swiss Francs given by the Swiss Authors Society and by Suissimage to the director of the winning film for its “inventiveness in script-writing and directing for renewal of cinematographic language and for thematic audacity and formal audacity”.