Ahora y siempre

Argentine director Rosendo Ruiz has a penchant for showing ordinary people (like us) doing ordinary things. In this film, the ordinary people are students of the Instituto Juan Zorrilla de San Martin, a combination middle/high school in Córdoba Province incorporated into the University of Córdoba. Students developed the script and participated in the film at all levels with the collaboration of teachers, retired teachers, former students and parents. The work was endorsed by several cultural entities, among them the Ministry of Education of Córdoba Province and the University.

Nothing out of the ordinary happens. Teenagers do their things: make and unmake friendships and relationships, dance, use drugs occasionally and complain about the insensitivity of the school's grading system, that ignores that different people learn in different ways. They seem to have an easy relationship with faculty and have frank, sometimes abrasive discussions (an Argentine specialty). They also study, but don's talk much about it lest they are branded as bookworms or nerds. Out of school they sort out their sometimes edgy family relationships.

This being a movie about high school students, it invites comparison, with another of the director's movies, Maturitá (2016). In the latter, students face weighty problems like university choices, toxic relationships, and political awakening. These have no role in this film. All in all the material doesn't seem to be the stuff from which movies are made; however, the director weaves his magic and we are absorbed into the teenagers' lives from beginning to end. A fascinating, unusual movie.