Nacido y criado (Argentina, 2006) 100 minutes Director: Pablo Trapero
Cast: Federico Esquerro, Martina Gusman, Guillermo Pfening, Tomas Lipan, Victoria Vescio

The Argentinean director Pablo Trapero, has given us two excellent and quite different films in the thriller El Bonaerense and the amiable road-movie Familia Rodante. Here is another typically intelligent, deeply involving piece of cinema. It is the story of Santiago, played by Guillermo Pfening, a raggedy-looking young guy who finds himself working in a menial job at a remote airstrip in the desolate landscape of Patagonia.

The reason for his winding up at the end of the world is explained in the movie's opening section. But it is his limbo life here in Patagonia that is the meat of the film, and it is here that we see that whatever pull the past has on him, he is developing a poignantly stunted kind of new life. Santiago even has a new family of sorts: his buddies at the airport. Trapero's camera impassively records Santiago's new fugitive existence and shows that however numbed Santiago is in this new world, the people involved in it are real too. Trapero creates a cinematic eco-system that scene by subtle scene, completely enfolds you.

On Patagonia:
Charles Darwin
…. In calling up images of the past, I find that the plains of Patagonia frequently crossed my eyes; yet these plains are pronounced by all wretched and useless. They can only be described by negative characters: without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support only a few dwarf plants. Why, then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on my memory?

W H Hudson
Judging from my own case I believe that we have here the secret of the persistence of the Patagonian images, and their frequent recurrence in the minds of many who have visited that grey monotonous, and, eminently uninteresting region. It is not the effect of the unknown, it is not imagination; it is that nature in these desolate scenes…. moves us more deeply than in others. ….The absence of animal forms and objects new to the eye, leave the mind open and free to receive an impression of nature as a whole.