A poet dies and another one, younger, feels an obligation to promote her work. She is joined by a team of women filmmakers. The film begins with this unusual triangle but, interestingly, it grows into something more complex and subtle than a traditional research project.

A woman vanishes. Two men take to the road in search of her: they both love her. Why did she leave? Each one of them has his own suspicions, and hides them from the other one who—mysteriously—never truly becomes his rival. Neither is right—but is anyone? This sudden runaway becomes the hidden core of a number of fictions that the film delicately weaves together: the secret of the heart of another woman, lost as well, many years ago; the secret of the life of a village in the countryside, governed by a supernatural incident that nobody seems to perceive; the secret of the plains, which never ceases to spread and devour everything, like the shadows that invade the world after the twilight hour.

The protagonist of Dog Lady is a woman (Llinás) who lives on the outskirts of Buenos Aires with a pack of dogs, in a house like so many other humble shacks in the urban sprawl of the city.

When a young woman (Laura Paredes) wins a radio contest, her prize is four days in a hotel in Ostende, a seaside town by the Atlantic coast in the province of Buenos Aires. Only it's not high season, so the beach proves blustery, the hotel is pretty much empty and she doesn't have much to do while she waits for her boyfriend to join her. So she listens to the stories of a friendly local waiter and watches the comings and goings of an older man and the two women who appear to be with him. From El Pampero Cine, the company responsible for Mariano Llinás' Extraordinary Stories and Alejo Moguillansky's Castro (LFF 2009) comes a playful study of voyeurism and the power of storytelling inflected through a feminist sensibility. Laura Paredes gives an assured performance as the outsider whose imagination goes into overdrive when faced with the reality of the sleepy spa resort. Laura Citarella may have described Ostende as a very small feature, but the mischievous nods to Hitchcock and Rohmer and the film's marked focus on ways of seeing actually render this a visually arresting and highly individual debut.
Maria Delgado