The Archipelago
( O Arquipélago )

Gustavo Beck
2014 - 28 min - Couleur - Brésil, Chili

Fragments of the daily life of Álvaro, who left Pinochet’s Chile in the 1980s to invent a new life for himself in Brazil.
A delicately drawn portrait of a discreetly unconventional family in Brazil, "The Archipelago" manages to share a space-time with its protagonist, the Chilean Álvaro Riveros. So much so, it gives the feeling that the diary of this man, drained by successive exclusions, has been filmed "from the outside".
Posted, for example, in front of the doorway of Álvaro’s room in his shared rented flat, the camera’s static frame-within-frame suggests the palpable uneasiness of a man who no longer feels in his place. A photojournalist dismissed by his newspaper, a separated father — Álvaro has "no more patience". Yet by filming fragments of his daily life and that of the family he left, the film seems to work at giving him back this patience cinematographically.