‘Slaughterhouse’ ★★★★
Address Santiago Fillol
interpreters Julio Perillan, Malena Villa and Ailin Salas
premiere December 9, 2022
More than ten years after its debut, “Ich bin Enric Marco” (2009)Essays about the man who made up his biography in Nazi concentration camps, a mix of nonfiction and fake documentaries, Santiago FillolThe Argentine filmmaker, living in Barcelona, where he also gives film lessons, is returning to directing. ‘Slaughterhouse’. This is another unclassifiable film that is a twist on paper to the general variant of cinema within cinema.
It is also a political story, but far from the traditions of so-called political cinema, it has nothing to do with Costa-Gavras or ‘Novecento’s Bertolucci’. Because like this wonderful fresco of the 20th century, ‘Slaughterhouse’ He also talks about class struggle, dreams and rebellions. He does this with the unsettling gaze of an American filmmaker who comes to Pampas in the mid-’70s to direct a film about the violent conflict between some workers and their employers. Shooting and reality, fiction and fiction are intertwined precisely through the awareness of the actors of the fictional film ‘Matadero’ torn between their creative work and their covert militancy during the dictatorship. Staging is concise and Fillol perfectly harmonizes what was going on on set with what was going on in Argentina’s violent daily life at the time – an excellent work with light.