close-up of the face and arms of a man in an inverted yoga posealr

The Practice
(La práctica)

Introduction by Martín Rejtman and Producer Victoria Marotta
Director in Person
$15 Special Event Tickets
Directed by Martín Rejtman.
With Catalina Saavedra, Esteban Bigliardi, Mirta Busnelli.
US/Argentina/Chile/Portugal, 2023, DCP, color, 93 min.
Spanish with English subtitles.
DCP source: Visit Films

With an understated spiritual questioning, The Practice returns to the searching narrative shared by all of Rejtman’s fiction films, now with a portrait of an Argentine yoga teacher, Gustavo (Esteban Bigliardi), living and working in Chile while navigating his divorce and what seems to be a new accident- and injury-prone stage of his life. The series of poignantly comic displacements stoically suffered by Gustavo thus resonate as emblems of a deeper quest as he is faced not only with his floating status as a newly single foreigner but also a serious muscle injury and, equally grave, the anxious attention of his overbearing mother. Gustavo’s suddenly unbalanced posture is, however, gently mirrored in the pratfalls and mishaps of the other yoga-practicing characters who together comprise a community of searchers and stumblersThe more personal, intimate inflection of Rejtman’s latest work is signaled by its partially autobiographical inspiration in the filmmaker’s own decades-long practice of Ashtanga yoga (including in a Chilean retreat) and his uncanny physical resemblance to the film’s lead, veteran Argentine stage and screen actor Bigliardi.

The Practice introduction and post-screening discussion with producer Victoria Marotta, Martín Rejtman and HFA Director Haden Guest.

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