Berlin Premiere: LA FLOR

LA FLOR (The Flower, Mariano Llinás, Argentina 2018) is an outstanding contemporary film project: a director and his four actresses play around with cinema, with their playful urges knowing no bounds. They create fantastical spaces and couldn’t care less about sense, logic, and dramatic structure, even forgetting time in the process. Film history is their adventure playground, where they spent over ten years completing a nearly 14-hour work. Yet one can hardly speak of a closed story. LA FLOR is an open work in the very best sense, continually sprouting new images and blossoming afresh, a wander through genre cinema, divided into three chapters, six episodes, and eight acts.

Mariano Llinás from the El Pampero Cine film collective and the acting troop Piel de Lava invite the audience to follow their intertwining narratives, which sometimes cross, but equally digress or simply peter out completely. A B-movie doesn’t necessarily have to end in a thundering showdown. The numerous voiceovers in the spy thriller contradict one another and deliberately lead the viewer up the garden path, while the images keep a further version of the story ready. Musical intermezzi recall the classic screenings of the magnificent cinema palaces of the 30s and 40s. The acting also involves a certain seriousness, which actresses Elisa Carricajo, Pilar Gamboa, Valeria Correa, and Laura Paredes perform with beautiful dedication, reflecting in the process both on their own roles as actress well as more traditional ones. While the work and its actresses are permanently reinventing themselves and shifting locations, one can practically see oneself watching and marveling.

LA FLOR was received enthusiastically at numerous festivals. Now Arsenal is showing the work as a Berlin premiere in compact form across three evenings (July 12 - 14), followed by screenings of the individual acts.