The latest work by Argentine film essayist Andrés Di Tella is a uniquely poignant and insightful portrait of his country’s most celebrated novelist, Ricardo Piglia. Eschewing any kind of traditional interview, Di Tella invented a more intimate means of engaging his close friend’s life and voice by encouraging Piglia to look back, for the first time, over the three-hundred-and-twenty-seven volume diary he has dutifully recorded since the age of sixteen. A kind of “diary of a diary,” as Di Tella provocatively calls his project, 327 Cuadernos follows Piglia’s return to his first act as a writer, revisiting cherished memories and tracing the strange distance between the self he recalls and the one he does not recognize. 327 Cuadernos is a rich extension of Di Tella’s previous film essays, deepening his long interest in the often uncanny intermingling of individual and collective memory underlying personal and official history. Piglia’s sudden diagnosis with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, midway through the filming, gives a sudden and sad urgency to 327 Cuadernos as the film itself becomes an unexpectedly important chapter in Piglia’s life and an inspiration for a new, heroic and possibly final diary project. – Haden Guest