Cinema Guild has announced the North theatrical release of Trenque Lauquen, the gripping and novelistic opus by acclaimed Argentine director Laura Citarella. Wiinner of the award for Best Latin American Picture at the Mar de Plata Film Festival, and a favorite at the Venice, San Sebastian, and New York film festivals, the film will have its U.S. theatrical release starting Friday, April 21 at Film at Lincoln Center in New York City, followed by a special screening at the American Cinematheque on Saturday, April 29, and theatrical engagements in other cities.
Told over the course of twelve chapters, and screening in two parts, Trenque Lauquen tells the story of Laura, a biologist cataloging plant species in the small town of Trenque Lauquen, Argentina, who has gone missing. Her boyfriend and a driver she’s worked with team up to track her down. The two men share stories and tour the doldrums of the Las Pampas area. As they get to know one another, they begin to unravel the mystery behind Laura’s disappearance, discoveries that lead to other discoveries, and even more questions.
The deeper we go into the rabbit hole, the more the film begins to unfold like a large map—sprouting stories within stories in a labyrinth of genres, characters, and vivid flashbacks. At turns detective caper, thriller, sci-fi tale, and romance, Trenque Lauquen changes perspective in its second part, and introduces supernatural elements into the drama.
It took Citarella six years to finish this film, which is one of an ongoing series of films centered on the character Laura, who also happens to share a name with both the filmmaker and the actress, Laura Paredes (Argentina 1985; La Flor). The first installment, Ostende (2011), followed Laura as she listened in, voyeur-like, to the stories of visitors in a seaside hotel near Buenos Aires; in Trenque Lauquen, Laura becomes the mystery herself.
Produced by El Pampero Cine, makers of the 14-hour opus La Flor (2018), Trenque Lauquen continues the film collective’s boundary-pushing approach to labyrinthine fiction filmmaking and is a testament to the idiosyncratic literary realism that has bloomed in recent Argentine cinema.
A tale of obsessive pursuit and the quest for personal freedom, Trenque Lauquen is a viewing experience that pushes the boundaries of the cinematic imagination and whose circular narrative, like its title suggests (“round lagoon,” in the native Mapuche language), will leave viewers submerged in its mystery.
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