Ernesto, an ordinary man who, after making a deal with a strange character, has the chance to return to the past and live his youth again, tries to recover lost opportunities and avoid certain behaviors to change his gray and insipid present.

In this episodic dramatic comedy Francella plays a whopping 16 different characters which “will confront conflicts reflecting the invisible pressure under which we live in a modern-day megalopolis,” said Cohn and Duprat. “The film presents a panorama of our ‘national being’ in a scathing and sarcastic but at the same time reflexive tone. Argentina is a country of immigrants, whose character is a sum of different origins and nationalities: Millions of Europeans came and mixed with Native Argentinians, creating a powerful and singular idiosyncrasy,” they added.

Leonardo, a successful industrial designer, lives with his family in an architectural wonder, a midcentury Le Corbusier home. One morning, he wakes to an irksome noise and is appalled to discover that workmen next door are constructing a large window that faces directly into his home. Leonardo protests, using a number of excuses (privacy, building codes, his wife), in an attempt to coerce his neighbor, Victor, into scrapping his plan. But Victor just wants a patch of sun to catch some rays. Thus, one man’s light is another man’s blight. Enamored of architecture, the film is meticulously designed. Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat give it a carefully crafted weirdness as well as a figurative quality. Its caustic humor comes in contemplating why the window completely undermines Leonardo. Does it reveal his arrogance, affectation, and lack of compassion; or dispel his bourgeois illusion of power? The Man Next Door offers a biting critique of moral shallowness—and what happens when thou dost not love thy neighbor’s window.

All About Asado is a trip into the culinary heart of Argentina. Asado, the tradition of grilled meat, is a food and also a ritual. It is primitive and modern, wild and sophisticated, an art and a science. Few phenomena reveal the essential characteristics of Argentina’s national identity with more originality and precision. Equal parts road-movie, documentary and fiction, Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn’s playful film delves into the almost sacred tradition of asado, using a sharp and irreverent gaze to explore the country’s meaty fixation.

2021 film directed by Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn

2016 film by Gastón Duprat & Mariano Cohn