LA PARTE DEL LEÓN

Shot during the dictatorship under an extremely strict system of censorship, and disguised as a detective story, La parte del león manages to elaborate on the feeling of frustration and loneliness that is so typical of the late Seventies. Adolfo Aristarain, a director hardly known at all outside Spanish-speaking circles, is the only Argentine director of the past thirty years with a solid and personal oeuvre, which invariably remains close to genre film. With great narrative precision and an unsentimental eye, he approaches classical American cinema without falling into the anachronism of his American colleagues. La parte del león tells the story of an inconspicuous man who turns into a monster after casually finding thieves booty. Concurrently, the city slowly unveils an unsuspected underworld, of crime at first glance, which actually results from the stifling existence of a country subjected to state terrorism. La parte del león is pervaded by the intuitive notion of a country that will never be the same again.