Al otro lado
2013 · 16m · Argentina
Directed by Sofía Quirós
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Fourteen years ago the Buenos Aires government built a neighbourhood next to one of Argentina's largest landfills, and the families of Barrio Nicole convey, from their everyday lives, what it means to live with society's discarded waste.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the landfill documentary to wallow in poverty porn, but Quirós refuses the catharsis—she just lets Barrio Nicole *be*, which is somehow more unsettling than any righteous anger could be.
A formally restrained essay that inherits the patient observational tradition of Agnès Varda and the Kieślowski school, where the neighborhood becomes a site for contemplating the relationship between space, waste, and daily dignity through accumulated small moments rather than orchestrated pathos.
The real move here is the sound design—the ambient hum of the landfill becomes a character itself, a persistent low frequency that transforms what could've been a conventional talking-heads piece into something genuinely unsettling and immersive on a minimal budget.