Cuatreros
$12 Special Event Tickets
Argentina, 2016, DCP, color and b&w, 83 min.
Spanish with English subtitles.
An unexpected follow-up to Los Rubios, Carri’s unclassifiable latest documentary began as a film portrait of the legendary Isidro Velázquez (1928-1967), a notorious agitator and popular hero celebrated as the “last of the gauchos.” Velázquez was also, however, the subject of an important book written by Carri’s father and finished before his assassination by the dictatorship. And so Cuatreros (an Argentine term for horse rustler) gave way to another personal and charged odyssey by Carri, whose own voiceover narration guides its willfully meandering path towards a broader meditation on violence and Argentina’s dark history, with Carri dispassionately explaining, digressing and often speaking in angry and ironic counterpoint to the images on screen. Cuatreros’ first finished form was a multichannel installation whose traces are vivid in the scenes of Carri juxtaposing one, two and up to five different images drawn from archival footage.
“What do I seek? I search for films, also for family, a family that is alive, and one that is dead; I seek a revolution, its dead, some kind of justice; I search for my mother and fathers, desaparacidos, their remains, their names, what they left me. I make a Western of my own life. I seek a voice, my own voice, through the noise and rage of those shattered by that same bourgeois justice.” – Albertina Carri