La luz incidente

A movie is above all a story. It can have an excellent production and ambientation to an era, beautiful photography and even refined music, but if it doesn't have a story worth telling in its heart all is left is the aesthetics just as empty as a screen with only explosions and bullets flying around with no content. The actors do pretty good with the script and the story they are given but their acting is lost in the meaningless story. Some stories are meant to be told, some others are only relevant to the families that live through them and the script and the story seems only relevant to the family in the movie and probably the directors family but not anyone else. A 15 minutes short film could have told what the director took 95 mins to tell. When in a theater 20 out of 30 people fall asleep you are doing something way wrong, or the way we argentines call it, un BODRIO.

Luisa experiences a range of emotions in dancing with Ernesto. She wants to give in and also run away. She wants to cry and also cherish her joy. Is it convenience or love? A single mother to twin girls, Luisa struggles to rebuild her life after the loss of her husband and brother in a car crash. Ernesto is everything she needs and yet he is also smothering. Luisa starts to talk about the crash and he only unzips her dress. Ernesto is a man who knows what he wants; to possess.

"There are things too painful to talk about," said the director at the 2016 Miami International Film Festival screening "to survive you can't look back."

This luminous, 1960s centered, black and white film is, according to the director, "six and 44 years in the making." Rotter is referring to how long it took to make the film and also how many years he has lived and thought about this family tragedy. The collective memory of the tragedy was like mist and no one wanted to discuss it. Family portraits he found "appeared like ghosts." Rotter wanted to help uncover how his family was built.

Like the stars at night and Luisa's dance with Ernesto, the film is radiant, yet also distant, silent and multi-faceted. The audience fills in the gaps.