AVENUE RIVADAVIA

Everything starts with a long travelling shot. Rivadavia Avenue in Buenos Aires, allegedly the longest in the world, could well offer nothing more than clichés of the Argentine capital: tango lessons and legendary café terraces, elegant buildings, hotels… But on the way, the stroll bumps up against lapses of memory, repressed pasts that resurface. In the central district, in full view of all, behind a commonplace façade, is a torture centre from not so long ago. Victims of the dictatorship, scars of economic collapse… The absence of the missing and victims of the crisis makes itself felt in those who remain – the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo or the unemployed woman who goes back to work in a hotel that closed down and was then reopened by the staff. Little by little, the avenue exchanges its physical length for endurance in time. In a very telling sequence of a Spanish lesson, the mainly Asian class faces a teacher who, in a late reverse shot, also turns out to be Asian: the assumption of recent immigration crumbles before the proof that time has already passed, and that the identity of a large city is continuously being reinvented. What is time? Christine Seghezzi might reply, as did the watchmaker she met: “If you ask me, I don’t know, and if you don’t ask me, I know”… (Charlotte Garson)