FILMS/
A WEEK ALONE
Una semana solos
New Directors
Argentina, 2008, 110 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Sat, May 2 / 6:15 / Kabuki / WEEK02K
Tue, May 5 / 3:30 / Clay / WEEK05Y
Thu, May 7 / 8:45 / Clay / WEEK07Y
CREDITS
- dir
-
Celina Murga
- prod
-
Juan Villegas
- scr
-
Celina Murga, Juan Villegas
- cam
-
Marcelo Lavintman
- editor
-
Elaine Katz
- mus
-
Inés Gamarci, Martín Salas, Marcelo Perez
- cast
-
Magdalena Capobianco, Eleonora Capobianco, Ignacio Giménez, Gastón Luparo, Lucas del Bo, Ramiro Saludas, Federico Peña, Natalia Gómez Alarcón, Manuel Aparicio, Mateo Braun
- source
-
Tresmilmundos Cine, Argentina. EMAIL: juanmaville@gmail.com.
-
CAUSES
Youth
Celina Murga’s second feature A Week Alone is a subtle examination of a group of rich Argentine children living in an exclusive gated community located a comfortable distance from Buenos Aires. With their parents temporarily away on a trip, and the only adult around an unintrusive maid, the group of siblings and cousins are left to govern themselves and live as they please. They begin cautiously testing boundaries, staying up late, watching normally forbidden television shows, breaking into an uninhabited nearby house and generally exploring the possibilities of freedom as if in a contemporary, though certainly less urgent version of Lord of the Flies. Events progress slowly and without artifice, and eventually you realize you have entered a very private, nuanced world within a world, where secret motivations surface and unwritten social rules are quietly tested and enforced. Tensions heighten with the arrival of the maid’s brother, Juan, a young teen from a poorer rural area. Class distinctions come to the fore in the reactions of the children to Juan, Juan’s perception of the wealth of the gated community and both the maid’s and the security force’s inability to really monitor or discipline the children despite their increasingly delinquent behavior—a fact the children intuitively grasp from the beginning. Despite seemingly opposite styles, Martin Scorsese was so impressed by Murga’s work, and her “very sensitive, very unique” perspective, that he chose her for his mentorship program, and pronounced A Week Alone, “a film that I can learn from.”
—Gustavus Kundahl
West Coast Premiere.
