Medium is a film portrait of pianist and artist Margarita Fernández. Instead of retelling the story of a life, Edgardo Cozarinsky combines scenes of Fernández playing entire piano pieces with her reflections on music and art, memories of a specific concert, archive footage of performances in the 70s and encounters with her students. Brahms is the other protagonist of the film alongside Fernández, as everything seems to revolve around him for her: when she’s at the piano, in her stories and reflections, in her attempts to articulate what it means to make music, in her thoughts on passion. Fernández has an engagingly calm, intelligent and sensitive way of engaging with the world and the filmmaker and is more than an individual artistic personality in this film: Cozarinsky places her in an in-between space, making her visible as a mediator who builds bridges between the past and the present, between different generations, between scores and music, sounds and images and her art and that of cinema.

Films about confinement during the pandemic may have gone viral, but La edad media is a species of a whole other kind. Lucid and ludic, terribly funny but also deeply serious at the same time, this film co-directed by dancer and choreographer Luciana Acuña and filmmaker Alejo Moguillansky has a wise, privileged narrator: their ten-year-old daughter Cleo. Through her eyes, the film deals with far more issues than mere Covid routines, such as online lessons and virtual shopping, the latter of which turns awfully weird here. Rampant inflation, cultural policy and market value are on the menu of La edad media, which expands upon the question raised by Moguillansky in his previous film Por el dinero (2019): is it possible for artists to pay the bills with their work? And if so, at what cost? The cinematic use of the restricted space of the family home is masterful in all its possibilities, which Acuña and Moguillansky embrace with a crazy, slapstick spirit augmented with Samuel Beckett’s Theatre of the Absurd. And a special mention goes to Juana, the family dog: Aki Kaurismäki would surely love to cast her in his next film.

Moguillansky’s follow-up to The Gold Beetle is a fantasia that elegantly weaves together disparate elements: Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the little match girl, Bresson’s saintly abused donkey Balthazar, a Red Army Faction member’s correspondence with an Argentine pianist, and a composer trying to mount an opera at the Teatro Colón. Winner of Best Argentine Film at last year’s BAFICI, The Little Match Girl is infused with emotion, and never devolves into the obscure or didactic, despite its many literary and cinematic references. Featuring exquisite cinematography from Inés Duacastella, this spectacular work must not be missed.