El Marionetista
2017 · 29m · Argentina
Directed by Carlos Lascano
Genres: drama, fantasy, mystery
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, theatrical
A puppeteer living in the darkness of his small theater relives his most beautiful love story every day, until a mysterious character appears determined to take from him the most valuable thing he has.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise wants to be a metaphysical gut-punch—puppeteer, loops, theft of memory—but it plays it completely straight, trading the actual weirdness of a man *becoming* his own marionette for Gothic theater-kid melancholy.
Lascano taps into a lineage of shadow-play cinema and romantic tragedy that runs from the German Expressionists through contemporary magical realism, and the restraint of the 29-minute form lets the theatrical vocabulary—light, puppet, repetition—accumulate real formal weight.
The decision to let the puppets themselves carry emotional truth rather than hide behind them as mere metaphor is what transforms this from precious into piercing; there's a technical economy in that choice that elevates everything around it.