Hugo Santiago presents Invasion at the 49th New York Film Festival

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 07 August 2012 01:47

Written by Jack Angstreich

Invasion
directed by Hugo Santiago
starring Olga Zubarry, Lautaro Murúa and Juan Carlos Paz

Originally released in 1969, the Argentinean film, Invasión, was presented at the 49th New York Film Festival on October 5, 2011. An extraordinary, very rarely screened fantastical, metaphysical thriller, it was written by two literary titans, the late Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. The 73-year-old director Hugo Santiago's mise-en-scene is a brilliant engagement with its enigmatic screenplay, with startling location shooting and mesmerizing black-and-white photography, here presented in a stunning restored print.

Invasion takes place in Buenos Aires, where a clandestine group of friends, businessmen, and charged youth have joined forces to fight off an invasion of their city by unknown forces -- men in tan suits. The story is enigmatic — this mysterious invasion by forces that seem to allude to the shadowy right-wing forces that have influenced Argentinean politics for decades. Borges was himself persecuted by the Peron regime.

The resistance to these invaders is similarly metaphoric — do they represent some remnant of an aristocracy that opposes the corruption of modern tyranny? or are they the emblem of populist aspirations? The narrative proceeds as an intricate series of episodes of move and counter-move between the opposing forces with the topography of Buenos Aires deployed as a quasi-subterranean, expressionist landscape. 

And as a highlight of the Film Festival, Santiago made appearance at a Q&A after the film where he entertained the audience with several intriguing anecdotes. He recounted that after Bioy Casares left for Europe, he worked with Borges every day on the script for a year. 

Now a grand old man of the Argentinean avant-garde, Santiago also said that even though Borges was nearly blind when he saw the film, he was still able to identify a couple of elements in the final work that weren't present in the original screenplay.

In response to a question about his approach to sound design in this film, Santiago emphasized the structured musicality of the aural landscape he created for Invasión.

So both screening and talk afterwards made this Invasion maybe less enigmatic but certainly most engaging.

To learn more go to:  http://www.filmlinc.com 

Invasion
October 5, 2012

49th New York Film Festival
Walter Reade Theatre
165 West 65th Street
New York, NY  10023

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