Talatala Filmmakers will premiere two amazing documentaries:

Guido Models by Julieta Sans

“Selling anticuchos wasn’t his dream, so after trying different jobs and getting fired a few times, Guido started as an assistant cutter in a textile shop.” The paragraph is located somewhere down the middle of a splendid profile of Guido Fuentes (Tarija, Bolivia, 1974) that was published on the website of the Bolivian Consulate in Rosario. That piece of information also lies around the middle of Guido Fuentes’ actual life. If not right in the middle, it’s nevertheless the fact that splits it in two: from that point on, Fuentes worked in the fashion world and founded his own company Guido Models, a school/model agency in Buenos Aires’ shanty town Villa 31. Directed by the Argentine photographer Julieta Sans, Guido Models is also a splendid portrait, maybe not as sweetened as the other one but certainly more sour, and definitely more poignant: the director follows Guido and his models from a fair distance, which allows her to see how well the magician and princesses work in close-up. But when the shot gets wider, an arid reality gets in the frame –one that has to be dealt with and might be the key to this small epic story. MP

35 y soltera by Paula Schargorodsky

A Jewish version of Bridget Jones is the starting point for this first film that was born out of a viral YouTube video. “Why am I still single?” “What’s wrong with me?” and “Have I done something wrong?” form the algid repertoire Schargorodsky’s self-inquiry unfolds in this documentary in which other people’s voices sound too strong. But the misfortunes of a single girl –told with the tone of an American rom-com– lead to a journey back in time to Montevideo, Rome, and India: Paula wants to interview her ex-boyfriends and see if what they have to say is more real than what she hears from her mother, her friends, or the dozens of hours of video footage she recorded back when love was alive. When faced with them, the comedy doesn’t hold and the tone is dropped. She needs to make a different film: what this 35 years-old woman discovers is way more intense than a mandate or a chronology. And single-desperate-Paula knows how to make room for director-Paula to capture, in the unexpected warmth of those conversations, something more like the testimony of the love affairs that existed and were much more than just searches for a “happily ever after.”