The Man Next Door

Director: Mariano Cohn, Gastón Duprat
Screenwriters: Andres Duprat

Institute History

  • 2010 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Leonardo, a successful industrial designer, lives with his family in an architectural wonder, a midcentury Le Corbusier home. One morning, he wakes to an irksome noise and is appalled to discover that workmen next door are constructing a large window that faces directly into his home. Leonardo protests, using a number of excuses (privacy, building codes, his wife), in an attempt to coerce his neighbor, Victor, into scrapping his plan. But Victor just wants a patch of sun to catch some rays. Thus, one man’s light is another man’s blight.

Enamored of architecture, the film is meticulously designed. Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat give it a carefully crafted weirdness as well as a figurative quality. Its caustic humor comes in contemplating why the window completely undermines Leonardo. Does it reveal his arrogance, affectation, and lack of compassion; or dispel his bourgeois illusion of power? The Man Next Door offers a biting critique of moral shallowness—and what happens when thou dost not love thy neighbor’s window.

— John Nein

Screening Details

  • Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
  • Film Type: Dramatic Feature
  • Country: Argentina
  • Language: Spanish
  • Run Time: 103 min.

Sundance Film Festival Awards

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