A 50-year-old cartoonist with five kids and aging parents faces a mid-life crisis, complicated by a hernia. His physical limits force him to reflect on freedom, family duties, and what matters most.

2012 film by Daniel Burman

In 1999, Argentina's peso craters. Ariel, a young man from Buenos Aires' Jewish community, deals with his mother's fatal illness, finds a job as a night shift surveillance camera monitor, and wonders when he'll discover sex. Santamaria, middle aged, loses his bank job and is dismissed by his wife; he finds stolen wallets in dumpsters to return to their owners. Ariel tells Santamaria's story to a TV reporter who profiles lives on the street. She's Laura, in a relationship with another woman, but perhaps available. Ariel desires Laura, while Santamaria courts Elsa, a washroom attendant who's husband is in prison. Christmas and Hanukkah approach; can anyone connect?

They are both alone. They need each other but, at the same time, they despise each other. Siblings Marcos and Susana are unable to heal the old wounds festering within them after the death of their mother. When Susana sells their mother's flat, she deprives her brother of the home where he had cared for their mother his whole life. Marcos's need to start living again surfaces when his sister forces him to leave Buenos Aires for Uruguay.

A man in his thirties does not want to be like his father, but that seems to be unavoidable.

After years away Ariel returns to Buenos Aires seeking to reconnect with his father who has founded a charity foundation in Once, the city’s Jewish district where Ariel spent his youth. But Usher appears to be staving off a meeting with his son; instead he keeps roping him into a number of small assignments during the course of which Ariel meets Eva who volunteers for Usher’s charity. Like Ariel, she too feels estranged from her father, and no longer speaks. Together they look back at the past in order to shape the present. Eva’s radiant inner strength and independent spirit inspires Ariel to come to grips with the religious customs of his Jewish community as well as the traditions that once divided him and his father and rethink his own identity. After El abrazo partido (in Competition in 2004) und Derecho de familia (in Panorama in 2006), Daniel Burman once more explores the interplay of forces within a father-son relationship. Tenderly, and with a lightness of touch, he has Ariel let go of his old expectations and allow himself to be drawn into the centre of a vibrant and fascinating community. berlinale 2016

2004 film by Daniel Burman