CARTA A UN PADRE

“Last night, I dreamt I was at Entre Ríos…”: when these words are heard offscreen, the pond, the horses, the splendour of a real landscape have already been seen, like a wish come true before it has been uttered. As is his habit, Edgardo Cozarinsky mixes traces, displaces documents, this time the papers of his long dead father and those of the small Argentine colony where he was born. With the distance in time and space (the filmmaker travels to his father’s village for the first time), a photo, a letter blow up into a dizzying fiction. How did this “Jewish gaucho” have the nerve to join the Navy when he was eighteen? What is the meaning of the inscription on the sword that Lieutenant-Commander Cozarinsky brought back from Japan? Do the questions that death has left unanswered have to be answered? Rather than confining this genealogical quest to himself, Cozarinsky opens it out to the other, to History and also the others in History, like the natives who spontaneously offered the Europeans milk on their landing. At times a poem that appears uninvited, like the discreet embroidery on a fabric, at times a contemporary document – the anti-Semitic slogan on a 2013 tax declaration form – the film does away with any hint of nostalgia in this lucid and testamentary letter to the father: “My shadow is the shadow of a young man. And I too, I’m the shadow of a young man”. (Charlotte Garson)