Life of Jorge Luis Borges

Pioneering Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás is the truest inheritor of the Borgesian tradition with a vision of cinema that trumps settled notions. There are no limits or a stiffening of what cinema can be allowed to do. Llinás co-founded Argentina’s, a radical El Pampero Cine collective, a group that includes the other great filmmaker of our times, Laura Citarella. In his latest massive undertaking, Life of Jorge Luis Borges, Llinás sculpts a new form of the creative biography. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival in the Open – Non-Fiction section, this nearly six-hour saga flirts with the tether of creative possibility. An extensive foray into the life, work and politics of Jorges Luis Borges, who saw literature as a kingdom and books the only nation to believe in, the film achieves its mammoth scale through the smallest, most minute interventions. Llinás has no interest in a straightforward chronicle, a regular documentary’s beats. His probing builds through interruptions and flickering curiosities, stretching as far from the linear and conventional as possible.