Sheffield Dispatches
Alisa Lebow reports from the Sheffield Documentary Festival
Film 3, Day 1—I’m going to burn myself out at this rate. Hardly any time to eat and my eyes are starting to burn. I just got out of Argentinian Diary (Lupe Pérez García), a first person film purportedly about the filmmaker’s difficulty in distinguishing her right from her left. A weak premise if taken literally, but we soon realize the literal points to the political and she is
experiencing a particularly Argentinian trouble, where the Left and the Right wing became indistinguishable during the long reign of Peronismo and beyond. Admittedly one should really know ones Argentinian domestic politics to be able to follow all of the ins and outs of this political/family drama but the personal is quite literally tied to the political in the twists and
turns of this film. It appears to be quite tightly scripted and is shot more like a fictional narrative than a documentary, using the filmmaker’s actual family and friends as her “actors”. One has to study quite closely to notice though, since these family actors perform their roles flawlessly and it is only in the complex camera set ups and the continuity shots that one’s attention is drawn to the intense premeditation of it all.
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