AWARDS
NOMINATED FOR 8 ARGENTINEAN FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION AWARDS:
Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, New Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Music
At the end of the 19th century, a baby girl is born only feet from the new world as a ship of immigrants docks in Buenos Aires harbor. Shy and self-conscious, Gertrudis grows up and into her role as the ugly duckling in a colony of Argentinean Jews. She fashions herself almost invisible, even hiding her face in photographs. After she is married off to an older, wealthy Jewish rancher, Gertrudis meets expectations and raises a family. The years pass and she finds solace in the beauty of everyday life, turning the tasks of setting the table or preparing a meal into aesthetic pursuits. One day her husband invites a gentle, nomadic French photographer to take a family portrait. His wondrous Surrealist photographs and uncompromising vision, allow Gertrudis to see herself for the first time.
A lyrical, inventive new feature film from award-winning Argentine director María Victoria Menis, Camera Obscura employs a number of visual innovations, including original Surrealist-inspired photographs and black-and-white films, archival World War I photographs, and hand-drawn color animation. The film-within-a-film sequences —fantasies drawn from the characters’ imaginations— were written by María Victoria Menis and Alejandro Fernández Murriay and designed and created by renowned Argentine artist-illustrator Rocambole (Ricardo Cohen). Beautifully shot on location, this luminous, remarkable film captures the rich landscape of Buenos Aires Province, and its fertile forests, fields, lagoons and rivers.
“Nietzsche found ugliness interesting and Kierkegaard was convinced that the ugliness enabled us to remember reality. The territory of ugliness is a place known only to those who live in it. With my camera I would like to open the frontier of that world, immerse myself in it, and discover its overwhelming beauty.” - María Victoria Menis
Argentinean director and scriptwriter María Victoria Menis was born in Buenos Aires and graduated from Argentina's ENERC. Her first films were the shorts Vecinas (1984) and A qué hora (1985), which won two George Melies awards from the French Embassy in Argentina. Menis’s first feature film, The Patriotic Spirits (1989), won a number of awards including the Best First Feature Award from the Argentinean Film Critics Association, and Best First Feature from the Santa Fe Festival and the Bariloche Festival. She has written and directed numerous plays and television programs.
In 2004 Menis wrote and directed El Cielito, a touching story about the love between a child and his guardian. The feature film screened in over 60 international film festivals and garnered numerous prizes, including the FIPPRESCI prize at the Havana Film Festival, the Canal-Arte, CICAE and Signis Future Talent awards at the San Sebastian International Film Festival and the Special Jury and Best Male Leading Actor awards at the Biarritz Film Festival.
Menis currently teaches in the ENERC program at the University of Buenos Aires and at the Escuela de Cine de Avellaneda in Buenos Aires. She is at work on a new film project.
INSTITUTIONAL USE
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Institutional Use Policy (pdf)
The National Center For Jewish Film
Brandeis University, Lown 102, MS053, Waltham MA 02454
P: (781) 899 7044, F: (781) 736 2070
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