Directors: Martin Benchimol

Gender: Documentary film

Year: 2023

Premiere: 6/10/23

★★★

It is not ‘The Castle’ by Franz Kafka but, in its own way, this film by Argentine Martín Benchimol is just as labyrinthine. It acquires the features of a documentary, but we already know that the genre has been hybrid for at least a couple of decades, and what the images and words tell us arises from reality to metamorphose into other forms of storytelling. It is also a film in which the two main characters, a woman and her daughter, are equally or even less important than the house they live in, the castle of the title.. The woman, a domestic employee, has inherited it from her employer. It is a large, spacious mansion, perhaps too spacious, in the middle of the Argentine pampas. A place like Edward Hopper but with other nuances, nooks and meanings. He has inherited it with the express condition of its owner that she never sell it, so The mansion, the castle, also acquires shades of prison: they cannot get rid of it..

Justina and Alexia, mother and daughter, really exist, and their story is true. Benchimol met them seven years ago. Then, he films them imposing other criteria beyond the documentary. In fact, The prominence of the mansion is crucial since it acts directly on the two charactersmaking, in this perhaps forced coexistence, mother-daughter relationships very different from what they would have been in another context, in another space.