Harvard Film Archive Film Screening: Photographs by Andrés Di Tella

Speaker: Andrés Di Tella, Filmmaker and Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor, Harvard University
Moderated by: Ignacio Azcueta, PhD Candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

Photographs (Directed by Andrés Di Tella. Argentina, 2007, DCP, color, 110 min. Spanish with English subtitles.) is the second installment of Andrés Di Tella’s “family trilogy,” a series of subjective documentaries centered on his family. Split between a first part in Argentina and a second part in India, the film functions both as a meditation on the memory of a lost mother and a road movie that registers a trip to a culture that the filmmaker feels as his own, but that he, ultimately, knows little to nothing about. Exploring cultural missed encounters, the movie explores what the idea of a cultural or ethnic origin could mean and how cultural mythologies traffic within them manifold forms of oppression. Through a creative use of montage that mixes original footage, media and Di Tella’s personal archives, Photographs also reflects on the often-deceptive optics of memory and how film can aid in mourning the past. – Ignacio Azcueta The screening will be followed by a conversation between Di Tella and Ignacio Azcueta.  This screening is part of the Harvard Film Archive program Archives and Memories. Di Tella will then introduce the screening of Under Construction. 

Andrés Di Tella (b. 1958) is a filmmaker, writer and curator, based in Buenos Aires. His films include Montoneros, una historia, La televisión y yo, Fotografías, El país del Diablo, Hachazos, ¡Volveremos a las montañas!, 327 cuadernos and Ficción privada. His work spans video art, installations and performance pieces, as well as TV documentaries. He has published two books: Hachazos and Cuadernos. He was the founding director of the BAFICI (Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival) and artistic director of the Princeton Documentary Festival at Princeton University, where he was also visiting professor. He currently directs the Film Program at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Retrospectives of his work have been held at Filmoteca Española Madrid, Festival dei Popoli Florence, E Tudo Verdade Sao Paulo and Festival de Lima, among other places. He was distinguished with the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Premio Konex de Platino for best documentary filmmaker of the decade 2011-2020.

Ignacio Azcueta is a PhD candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He specializes in contemporary Latin American literature and film. His dissertation "Nostalgic Detectives: Narratives of research in contemporary Latin American Literature and Film (1996-2020)" explores the use of archival materials in contemporary Latin American literature and film, in order to understand their ethical and political interventions on history and memory.

Presented in collaboration with Harvard Film Archive