Mario Bellatin

Vienna, 2019 – the end of an era. The smoking ban in public places means that a part of Kaffeehaus culture has disappeared. Of all moments, this is the one that Angeliki chooses to buy an apartment with help from her interior designer friend, Carmen. Angeliki seems to have something against all of them: either the parquet floors creak, the tiles are the wrong colour or she is bothered by the proximity to a restaurant. How will she ever find a new home in this environment? Carmen feels like she’s talking to a brick wall. Moreover, she simply cannot understand why Angeliki is refusing to part with her money. A Journey from Vienna to Malaga, via salt flats overcast by mysterious shadows. A homage to the Austrian capital and the bygone splendour in ordinary things.

Enigmatic and deceptively playful in tone, this film from Gabino Rodríguez, in collaboration with Nicolás Pereda, boldly transforms mundane, realist observations at a rural Mexican schoolhouse into fantasy and a sly comment on childhood, rituals, and race.

The Argentine competition winner, Gonzalo Castro’s Invernadero (Winter House), offers a stylistically elegant if overlong contemplation of the experimental one-armed Mexican novelist Mario Bellatín, a famed prankster who here engages with his daughter and friends (all fictional characters) in an interrogation of biography (itself a central conceit in Bellatín’s fiction).