CÓMO ESTAR MUERTO / COMO ESTAR MUERTO

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Selected examples of a New Cinema

The street as habitat and houses as places of transition, the lack of money, the cult of wandering, infinite conversations going nowhere, and the perplexed or distant look on the adult world are classic topics of «youngster movies», and this is where these youngsters are inscribed - more than being adrift, they seem to be drift itself. The double title Manuel Ferrari chose for his film includes the director's point of view and the characters' perceptions. But that double condition of being and representing is also a game, which alternates between the apathy of characters with no previous plan, occupied in letting time pass by until something happens, and an unstoppable impulse for activity, of permanent transit through a city almost always empty and which doesn't seem to belong to them. Self-conscious of its filiations with the French New Wave, in Cómo estar muerto / Como estar muerto, the atonality in the direction of the actors, the splendid and melancholic use of black and white photography and the equidistance between the realism of spaces and the will for artifice, not only search for a personality of style, they also include the movie in a wonderful, paradoxical terrain: the one of the avantgardes' tradition. (Sergio Wolf, Buenos Aires Festival Internacional)