The maker of the controversial film El modelo, about a man who lives on the fringes of society, in La sensibilidad places his camera before his grandmothers in an absolutely intimate setting to tell the story of militancy in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s and its effects. Two elderly women, mothers of people who were disappeared, talk and share their memories with their filmmaker grandson. Scelso shuns the congenial to return to an almost amateur aesthetic, which he uses mercilessly to dissect his characters. Like in Numéro zéro, with Jean Eustache’s portrayal of his grandmother, there is an urgency to capture fading memories and bodies, to fix an episode in the life of a family and, by extension, of a whole country. De ojos privada, says the filmmaker, “was somehow the starting point leading to the theme of La sensibilidad. Filming from the windows of a house (of one of my grandmothers), I spied on the everyday life of the local people in a typical neighbourhood of Córdoba, while in another sector of the city, a team of anthropologists was excavating a mass grave found in a cemetery with remains of people disappeared during the dictatorship”.
Attended by Iván Marino.
De ojos privada, Germán Scelso, 2003, 30 min; La sensibilidad, Germán Scelso, 2011, 60 min. Video screening OV with English Subtitles.