Directors: Martin Benchimol
Gender: Documentary
Year: 2023
Premiere: 6/10/23
★★★
It is not Franz Kafka’s ‘The Castle’, but this film by Argentinian Martín Benchimol is just as labyrinthine in its own way.. It takes on the characteristics of a documentary, but we already know that the genre has been hybrid for at least a few decades, and that what images and words tell us has moved out of reality and into other forms of storytelling. It is also a film in which the two main characters, a woman and her daughter, are as important, if not less important, as the house they live in, the castle of the title.. The woman, a domestic worker, inherited this from her employer. A large, spacious, perhaps too spacious mansion in the middle of the Argentinian pampas. A place like Edward Hopper but with other nuances, corners and meanings. It was inherited from its owner on the condition that he never sell it. The mansion and the castle become the shadows of the prison: they cannot escape from it..
Justina and Alexia, mother and daughter, really exist and their story is true. Benchimol met them seven years ago. He then films it by imposing other criteria beyond documentary. Actually, The prominence of the host is very important as it directly affects two characters.This perhaps causes mother-daughter relationships in forced coexistence to be very different from what they would be in another context, in another place.