Directed by: Benjamin Naishtat
Starring: Claudio Martínez Bel, Mara Bestelli, Alfredo Castro, Rudy Chernicoff, Diego Cremonesi, Rafael Federman, Andrea Frigerio

A mid-sized, detached 1970s home, its windows shuttered like the closed eyes of a coma patient. A portly, well-dressed man emerges carrying an ornamental clock before a girl scurries off with an armful of clothes, an older lady totters out under the weight of a gilt mirror and some men manoeuvre a TV through the doorway. They are not residents, nor neighbours attending a yard sale; they are scavengers, implicitly turning some unseen family’s misfortune to their own end. This is regional Argentina in 1975, and while the coup d’état won’t happen for months, the unease of it is already an airborne disease carried backward on the wind. Argentina’s middle-classes are battening down the hatches of self-interest against the storm to come. 

Set before the coup that installed a military junta in Argentina, Benjamín Naishtat’s satire is a disturbing parable of iniquity in which a surreal night comes back to haunt a local counsellor. 

Introduced by Dr Nicola Astudillo-Jones, a specialist in Latin American cinema. She is also a lecturer in Spanish at the University of Chester