Watch A Nation's Struggle To Be Born In The Trailer For THE MOVEMENT (EL MOVIMIENTO)

Director Benjamin Naishtat tackles the tumultuous birth of Argentina in his strikingly black and white feature The Movement (El Movimiento). Supported, as it was, by the Jeonju Digital Cinema project and having premiered in Locarno it comes as no surprise that there's a decidedly arthouse slant here but the trailer for the picture is very strong, indeed.

In that nebula that exists between the foundational myth and the actions of men, the nation is forged, and that is what El Movimiento is about: the Birth of a Nation, like that, with capital letters. But the nation is created by men, by their demagogy and their irreconcilable antagonisms. And this almost entirely manly world, of thick faces born from the earth -with Pablo Cedrón as banner and flag-, everything comes down to the constant battle between what is said and what is done. There are traces of the Gaucho-esque Borges and Martínez Estrada's obsession for the cursed Argentine origins, there are strokes of local western and, above all, there's an extraordinary eye for the pictorial, as brutal as this country. Any similarity between this political tale of men who promise and kill, betray and bring civilization by way of fire and daggers without resent is not mere coincidence. Naishtat dismantles the Costumbrismo that is so common these days and goes for the poetic, for a liturgy that, at the end of the day, is also very much our own.

Screening now as part of the Argentine Competition at Mar Del Plata, check out the trailer below!