Argentina
2017 · 21m · España
Directed by Joaquín Hermo
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Joaquín, who left Argentina for Spain at five, films a documentary fifteen years later, talking by Skype with his grandparents to rediscover his country, his roots, and its political polarization.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A Skype call with your grandparents doesn't sound like subversion until Hermo lets the screen lag, the pixelation, the distance itself become the point—suddenly the medium isn't cute navel-gazing, it's the only honest way to film a country you've already left.
Hermo inherits a lineage of essay-documentary that reaches back through Marker and Godard, but grounds it in something more intimate: the formal constraint of the Skype window becomes a meditation on how we document what we've lost, what we can only partially see.
The singular choice here is letting the lag and buffering stay in the edit—most directors would smooth it out, but Hermo understood that the stutter *is* the subject, that technical imperfection becomes emotional precision when you trust your audience to sit in that discomfort.