Ostende

Directed by Laura Citarella | 85 minutes | 18+

4:00pm, Saturday, 1 March | Buy Tickets | Buy Day Pass

A vacation is supposed to be a time to relax, let your imagination run wild, investigate something sinister ...

In Laura Citarella’s enigmatic ode to feminine voyeurism, Laura (Laura Paredes) passes the off-season at a drab seaside resort by spying on a trio of fellow revellers, projecting onto them ever-more elaborately sordid fantasies.

Before making her four-hour epic Trenque Lauquen (2022), a sensitive, surrealist mystery about a missing botanist, the visionary Citarella—a member of El Pampero Cine, the fiercely independent Argentinian filmmaking collective who describe themselves in the terms of a “rock band”—directed this sparse, absorbing prelude.

Stretching its Hitchcockian premise into a looser spiral through glimpses of crumpled letters, conversations and impenetrable gazes, its heroine, awaiting the arrival of her producer boyfriend, painstakingly veers both closer and further from discovery. With its blown out, sandy palette and bristling soft focus, Ostende is an eerie portrait of alienation, nevertheless struck through by Citarella and Paredes’ ravenous curiosity and fresh wit.

“It is as if fiction and procedurals were in charge of resolving the emptiness of the characters.” - Laura Citarella on OSTENDE

Followed by a pre-recorded interview with writer/director Laura Citarella.

Country: ARGENTINA
Year: 2011
Language: SPANISH