Such as the lonely drifter in Liverpool by Lisandro Alonso that rounds off the author’s trilogy about men isolated from the society who roam the nature (La libertad, Los muertos), even though the author is not an anthropologist and his search is utterly film-like. However, Liverpool is not only the trilogy’s most personal and serious part, but it is also utterly specific in comparison to the other two films because the author does not follow a narcoleptic hero lost on the fringes of the civilization to his very end, but on the contrary abandons him in the key moment. In the beginning of the film, he gets off a freighter in an ice-bound harbor town in Tierra del Fuego, and asks the captain to allow him to visit his severely ill mother, even though he is not even sure that she is still alive. That is the longest dialogue in the entire film. What follows is his long odyssey that ends with him arriving to a sawmill where he meets three lonely figures – his mother at her deathbed who does not recognize him, daughter who rejects articulating any feelings and an old man who takes care of them. This situation calls out for a full-blooded drama, however the author avoids it. The only means of communication between these strangers is the keychain with the word Liverpool that the father gives to the daughter and that refers to one of the many harbors that he has sailed into. Nevertheless, as much as his gesture seems mechanical at a first glance, the role of the keychain is not of a talisman but that object emphasizes the nonexistence of an address for this eternal nomad. Then the hero leaves his family in the same manner that the author abandons him. Namely, he decides to “take the side of Alonso” as a film maker, as if becoming aware of the vain relationship of film towards life.

Lucia Puenzo takes her The German Doctor into the untouched Chatwinesque landscapes of Patagonia, those magical expanses of wild infinity that knows no boundaries unless they are boundaries made of the sky and the earth. It is a story about the monstrous Josef Mengele who found refuge under a false name in the elegant hotels on the edge of the lake Nahuel Huapi. Children of the hotel’s owner become new guinea pigs in his genetic experiment with the goal of proving racial purity that he can now continue to work on without the threat of being caught by Mossad’s agents. His laboratory experiments are pure fiction (the film is based on the director’s novel with the same title) even though there are indications that the real Mengele continued his gruesome experiments on children and pregnant women after his exile to South America (some may remember the famous film by Franklin J. Schaffner The Boys from Brazil starring a bunch of famous Hollywood actors and speaking with a bad German accent, including Gregory Peck as Mengele). Thus, in this film, the main subject of Mengele’s research is the daughter of the hotel owner’s pregnant wife who is only one of his fixations. The character of the girl Lilith is, already at the start of the film, recorded in his drawing, as he watches her play on a beach with friends, although his pedophilic tendencies are merely discretely suggested and remain in the zone of the author’s indecisiveness. Lilith, as the live version of his Arian dolls for mass production, functions as a fine metaphor that is additionally emphasized in the scene that shows a German school and in the photographs of students posing in front of the Nazi flag.

A bit more to the north, deep in the woods of Bariloche, in the film Aura by the prematurely deceased Fabien Bielinski, the epileptic master of taxidermy (author’s favorite actor Ricardo Darin) takes part in a deer hunt, but by accident kills the owner of the hotel he is staying in. It was the perfect crime that he had been dreaming of for a long time. Even though the author uses the motif of manipulation as in his previous film The Nine Queens, Aura represents his counterpoint. Urban chaos is replaced by the hero’s slow and dreamy journey to the wild, accompanied by a conspirator who gets caught in the trap of someone else’s conspiracy. It is as if we are turning the worn out pages of forgotten pulp fiction from the 1950’s (a hut that hides mysterious diagrams, shooting in a factory, corruption in a provincial casino, and visit to the whorehouse for truckers), which directly echoes Cortazar and Borghes.

Patagonian white expanses fascinated Pablo Traper as well. He observes his film Born & Bred through the discourse of mythology of (inner) exile. His hero is caught in the attempt to escape his traumatized past, but that same past constantly haunts him during his sweaty nights. People that he meets drink to forget and roam the no man’s land as zombies, even though the crisis is now much more brutal than the one experienced by the protagonists of the author’s earlier films, uniting the physical and metaphoric, sensual and social. Three road stories by Carlos Sorin (Intimate Stories) are also situated in Patagonia as the no man’s land of lost souls. They are torn half way between comedy and micro-tragedy, following the trajectory of the grotesque. These are stories in which all roads lead to San Juan. Don Justo is hitchhiking around in order to find his lost dog’s spirit. Maria Flores is travelling to the city to pick up her award that she won in a TV show. Roberto is trying to seduce a widow by buying a cake for her son’s birthday. While following their destinies, Sorin is careful not to lose touch with lyricism. And Chatwin’s ghost is still here in all of this beauty and emptiness of wild infinity. (Dragan Rubeša)