Soy Buenos Aires
2016 · 15m · Argentina
Directed by Tomás Gómez Bustillo
Genres: biography, drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
If Buenos Aires were a person, what would it be like? A young man tells his story of ascent to fame from a hospital bed: of his messianic origins and his childhood in exile, and of how the name given to him by a bureaucratic error would mark his destiny forever: to be eclectic and contradictory, elegant and poor, nostalgic and idealistic; to be Buenos Aires.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to personify a city—it's exhausted—but Gómez Bustillo actually interrogates the conceit instead of wallowing in it, using a hospital bed and a bureaucratic accident as the engine for something genuinely strange about identity and national mythology; the contrarianism is that he makes you *believe* in the metaphor by refusing to make it easy.
This is essayistic portraiture in the tradition of Chris Marker and Harun Farocki—the formal choice to narrate a city's biography through a singular man's voice, inflected with exile and bureaucratic accident, sits at the intersection of personal testimony and collective history in a way that demands the kind of sustained formal attention that separates the festival-circuit essay film from the incidental meditation.
The decision to anchor an entire city-portrait in the flatness of a hospital bed—that austere spatial constraint—forces every formal choice (the voiceover's cadence, the archival image selection, the edit rhythm) to do the work of resurrection and contradiction, and it's that one constraint that transforms what could've been a cliché into something genuinely elegiac and alive.