Life of Jorge Luis Borges
Documentary Spanish
A biography of Jorge Luis Borges working from an exhaustive review of the papers he left, the books he read, the places he went to. And with this, an attempt to decipher a very peculiar life: someone who lived like a hidden, underground warrior, whose cause was literature, literature conceived as a kingdom and as a landscape. If Cold War spies fought from their desks or from an uninhabited house to defend their half of the world, Borges strove from a library to elevate and broaden the territories of his own tribe: the people for whom the most important part of the universe is books, plots and words. This film is devoted to that secret pilgrim (to borrow from Le Carré, the king of all spies).
| Cast: | Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Montequín, Nicolás Helft, Laura Paredes, Milva Leonardi, Pablo Dacal, |
|---|---|
| Director: | Mariano Llinás |
| Editor: | Ignacio Codino |
| Camera: | Agustín Mendilaharzu |
All Guild Reviews of "Life of Jorge Luis Borges"
Mariano Llinás’ Three-Part Sleuthing Travelogue Is a Film to Live Inside
Venice Film Festival 2026 | The ultimate vagrants of contemporary cinema, Argentina’s El Pampero collective has produced another rambling, nearly six-hour adventure between life, fiction, fantasy and charming investigation.
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.
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