Trenque Lauquen: Part 1 12A

This film is F-Rated

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From the archive

This film was last shown on 30 December 2023

Mysteries hide inside other mysteries like Russian dolls in Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen.

In this sprawling epic, set over two parts, twelve chapters, and 260 minutes, an Argentinian city west of Buenos Aires plays home to the labyrinthine story of a missing woman whose disappearance provokes far more questions than answers. What begins as a search for Laura (Laura Paredes) unfolds into varied, interconnected stories about, among other things, the secrets of lovers hidden inside library books, an enigmatic lake creature, the history of the land and its ecology, and one woman’s empowered self discovery.

Confusion is part of the equation here; the winding roads and tales of Trenque Lauquen are designed for meandering, for enjoying the discovery of riddles and puzzles, and for letting go of the need to make sense of it all.

Citarella works as part of the Argentinian film collective El Pampero Cine, an experimental production company who strive to make films together in innovative ways without relying on typical funding structures within the industry.

Trenque Lauquen, with its novelistic structure and expansive, genre-defying approach to an introspective narrative, displays the core aims of the group and their ever-ambitious style. The film is also a sequel of sorts; one of Citarella’s previous films, Ostende, follows the same Laura character (played by Paredes) as she attempts to uncover the mysteries of the guests at a hotel. As such, Citarella’s films and the wider work of El Pampero Cine suggest that remarkable things the freedom and joy of experimentation, repetition and collective creativity are possible in filmmaking today.

Tickets for each part of Trenque Lauquen are £5 for all. Part 1 can be found here: Trenque Lauquen: Part 2