Rotterdam Online: IFFR Offers 14-Hour-Long Anthology Film LA FLOR to Watch For Free

A gargantuan work, and possibly a cult film in the making, the Argentinean writer-director Mariano Llinás went down the storytelling rabbit hole and took Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa and Laura Paredes with him in La Flor. The result is a staggering 868 minutes of mostly stories with beginnings, middles and no ends.

The director himself described his ambition: "The idea is that one film should be a series of films, an era in the life of four people, and that cinema should be able to show this passing of time, this learning, this process. That from the different inventions and fantasies that the avatars of the project gradually contribute, one can see eventually the true face of the four women, shining brightly through the fog of fiction".

The VoD service of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, IFFR Unleashed, offers the whole film to watch for free.

The official synopsis:

A decade in the making, Mariano Llinás's La Flor is an unrepeatable labor of love and madness that redefines the concept of binge viewing. The director himself shows up at the start to preview the six episodes that await, each starring the same four remarkable actresses: Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes. Overflowing with nested subplots and whiplash digressions, La Flor shapeshifts from a B-movie to a musical to a spy thriller to a category-defying metafiction--all of them without endings--to a remake of a very well-known French classic and, finally, to an enigmatic period piece that lacks a beginning (granted, all notions of beginnings and endings become fuzzy after 14 hours). An adventure in scale and duration, La Flor is a wildly entertaining exploration of the possibilities of fiction that lands somewhere close to its outer limits. (Synopsis courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center)

Watch for free here across the Benelux until 6 April, 2020.