Rojo

“An Argentina Province. 1975”, are the first words you read when the film starts. The people you see coming in and out of a house and taking objects tells you a lot about what you are going to see: a story of secrets, of violence, of muted conflicts. Benjamin Naishtat hadn’t even been born when all this political upheaval happened and his approach to the subject is personal, indirect, subtle. His third film tries to convey the tensions, the implicit aggression and the hushed violence that surrounded the country at that time, a few months before the military coup. A couple of brutal acts trigger the narrative: a mysterious man verbally attacks a respected lawyer in a restaurant and, when they meet again in the middle of the night, things escalate quickly. What’s behind this? How should the town react to what has happened? As his previous films show, Naishtat is a master of creating visual tension that leads to unexpected bursts of violence. He is also one of the most political filmmakers of the younger generation. ROJO is his way of reading the conflicts of the present in light of the past, through the insidious ways in which a community closes in on itself when real horrors shake up their way of life. (Diego Lerer)