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Actor turned writer and director Juan Pablo Di Pace is making his feature debut with a decades-spanning meta romance. The star co-directs “Before We Forget” with Andrés Pepe Estrada from a script he wrote; the iconic late Norman Lear, who died in 2023, is an executive producer.

“Before We Forget” is a staggeringly beautiful depiction of trying (and sometimes failing) to remember every detail of our first loves. Di Pace leads the film as Matias, an Argentine filmmaker grappling with an unfinished movie that was inspired by his friendship with a Swedish classmate he met at boarding school in 1997. As the logline teases, “their bond, defined by tenderness and fascination, is abruptly severed when Alexander (Oscar Morgan) is expelled, leaving young Matias (Santiago Madrussan) with a story of unspoken emotions. Twenty-five years later, Matias reopens Pandora’s box, coming face-to-face with Alexander (August Wittgenstein) once again. As life begins to imitate art,...

From beneath the Southern Cross come a pair of genuine noirs that happen to have been made in Argentina, where film art flourished in a system almost totally divorced from the American awareness. The Beast Must Die is a hardboiled tale of tragedy and murder told in an upside-down way that would make Orson Welles applaud; its star was called the Vincent Price of Argentina. In the visually bizarre The Bitter Stems a generous crook makes plans to murder his cheating partner in fraud, only to fall into a whirlpool of guilt. Expert testimony from Guido Segal, Fernando Martín Peña and Daniel Viñoly introduce us to an exotic film world almost unknown in the U.S.. Hear Eddie Muller try out his Spanish language pronunciation skills!

Argentine Film Noir

The Beast Must Die + The Bitter Stems

Two Argentine films noir

restored by the

Film Noir Foundation

and the

UCLA Film...