Nuevo Cine Argentino in 10 films
After Argentina's economic crash, a new generation made cheap, patient films about workers, provincial families and the poor edges of the city. These ten films follow the movement from its first low-budget works to its mature, widely imitated style.
- 1Mundo Grúa 1999Pablo Trapero · IMDb 7.0A middle-aged former rock musician takes a crane-operator job far from Buenos Aires. Trapero's black-and-white debut set the movement's tone: small budget, working-class life, a gently comic eye.
Next: Bolivia
Trapero's working-class comedy gives way to Caetano's grimmer view of the city, filmed in black and white around a single café. - 2Bolivia 1999Adrián Caetano · IMDb 7.2In a Buenos Aires café, a Bolivian cook meets the resentments of the regulars. Caetano shoots in stark black and white and shows how economic crisis turns into prejudice.
Next: La ciénaga
From the city we move to the north, where Martel replaces Caetano's plain storytelling with a dense, sound-driven portrait of a decaying upper-middle-class world. - 3La ciénaga 2001Lucrecia Martel · IMDb 7.0Two extended families spend a sticky summer around a stagnant pool in Salta. Martel's debut feature builds a whole social order out of sound, heat and half-heard talk.
Next: La libertad
Martel's crowded rooms give way to one man alone in the countryside: Alonso strips the cinema down to work, landscape and silence. - 4La libertad 2001Lisandro Alonso · IMDb 6.8A woodcutter works alone in the Pampas, and the camera simply watches. Alonso's nearly wordless film is the movement's most radical step toward pure observation.
Next: El Bonaerense
Back in the city, Trapero takes the observational method into an institution, tracing how a newcomer is slowly drawn into a corrupt police force. - 5El Bonaerense 2002Pablo Trapero · IMDb 6.8A young locksmith from a small town joins the Buenos Aires provincial police. Trapero turns a straightforward story into a cool, exact study of institutional corruption.
Next: Lost Embrace
The tone lightens as Burman turns from police stations to a family comedy in a Jewish shopping arcade, showing that the new cinema could also be tender. - 6Lost Embrace 2004Daniel Burman · IMDb 6.9A young man in a Buenos Aires shopping arcade, home to a Jewish immigrant community, thinks about his absent father. Burman gives the movement its warm, family-centred comic side.
Next: Los muertos
Burman's urban warmth gives way to Alonso's river journey, a slower, more austere film that follows his woodcutter debut with a longer journey. - 7Los muertos 2004Lisandro Alonso · IMDb 6.7A man leaves prison and travels by river to find his daughter. Alonso's second film follows him almost without comment, and the jungle becomes a character.
Next: The Headless Woman
Alonso's solitary men give way to Martel's middle-class woman, as the movement's attention moves from the margins to the comfortable people who ignore them. - 8The Headless Woman 2008Lucrecia Martel · IMDb 6.5A woman driving on a country road hits something and cannot say what. Martel's third film turns her unease into a quiet portrait of class privilege and denial.
Next: Leonera
Martel's quiet unease is replaced by Trapero's sharper drama, with a young mother in prison and a story that borrows more from genre cinema. - 9Leonera 2008Pablo Trapero · IMDb 7.0A pregnant young woman is jailed and raises her son inside a women's prison. Trapero moves to a harder, more genre-driven drama without losing his documentary eye.
Next: Las acacias
From the noisy prison drama we end on a more patient film, in which a first-time director shows how far the movement's minimalism had spread. - 10Las acacias 2011Pablo Giorgelli · IMDb 6.9A truck driver carries a woman and her baby from Paraguay to Buenos Aires. Giorgelli's debut shows the movement's spare style passed on to a new director.
Where next: the school page lists many more films, and the Romanian New Wave guide shows another low-budget, realist movement that rose from a national crisis in the same decade.
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