Institute History
Description
Despite the initial successes of democratization, Argentina now finds itself in its most serious economic bind to date. With After the Storm, Tristan Bauer offers us a very contemporary portrait of life in once-splendid Buenos Aires: a moving tale of the decline and disintegration of a working-class family. As the film opens, the father is reeling from the closure of the factory where he has worked for years. Everywhere he turns, what he knew is gone—friends, unions, connections. He is medically unsuitable for work in other factories, and is forced to leave his home, taking his family to live in the shanty town on the edge of the endless Buenos Aires garbage dump. This is a society of despair, and the family falls apart. The son is jailed for drug running; the wife and daughter disappear. He escapes to his family home in the country to survive as a farm worker, where deeply rooted rural traditions provide a new source of hope and inspiration. Told in a style that consistently edges into surreally beautiful imagery—herds of wild horses grazing through the early morning mist rising from heaps of urban refuse—After the Storm is reminiscent of Fernando Birri's classic, Los Inundados, in its unflinching realism and extreme sense of the absurd.