Hugo Santiago

During the quarantine in 2020, the two friends Mariano Llinás and Matías Piñeiro sent each other video letters – 8 in total, 4 each of them – to create a compilation of ideas, thoughts and exchanges commissioned by Sergi Álvarez Riosalido for La Casa Encendida (Madrid). Llinás is in Argentina and Piñeiro is in New York, and they begin to order each other portraits of places, reflections on artists, ideas on cinema.

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In 1973 Hugo Santiago made Les Autres, his second feature film. The film was produced in Paris by a team composed mostly of Argentines, and written together with Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Even so, the film ends up representing France in the official competition at the Cannes festival in 1974. That premiere is a great scandal in which political reasons and film criticism are confused. In this brief introduction, Hugo gives us some clues to better understand his most unknown work, and suggests that after the controversy unleashed in Cannes his career changed forever.

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In 1969 Argentine filmmaker Hugo Santiago directed Invasión, his opera prima, written by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and later settled in France. This film documents his return to Buenos Aires in 2013 to shoot his latest film, Le ciel du centaure.

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Feminism, Victoria Benedictsson, Leandro N. Alem, the Radical Party in Argentina, suicide, stunts, Edgar Allan Poe, the complicated relationship between low-budget films with a political aim and the film industry, Robert Louis Stevenson, fiction, facts, greed, gold treasures left by the Jesuits in Argentina, the 19th Century vs. the contemporary and the search for truth and wisdom are the background for this portrait of a clash between a Swedish artist and an Argentine film director.

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Hugo Santiago discusses the process of writing with Jorge Luis Borges the screenplay for the film Invasión (1969).

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Shortly after murdering his professor, a young man encounters a sailor who offers him a position on his ship in exchange for 3 Danish crowns and his attention as he recounts his life story.

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A charming tale of murder, perversity and narrative echoes told through shots of barking dogs and a La jetée-like series of stills.

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A documentary interview with the French actress while on the sets of films in production. Several of the directors for whom she has made films are also interviewed

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A french engineer travels in a ship that stops in Buenos Aires, where he must deliver a packet to a mysterious man that is to hard to catch. He then must pursuit him in a labyrinthic city.

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James Faulkner plays Lew Millar, a renowned private eye who is hired by a gangster to be his bodyguard. When Millar arrives at the criminal's French hideaway, the gangster is already dead. Among the people Millar investigates are the gangster's brother, the man's sister-in-law, and their teenage daughter. A judge may also offer insight into the case, as well as Millar's own past.

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This is a journey of friendship, an Argentinian is going to rediscover his continent while searching for his friend from Bahia. And while the work, the records and the career of this great lady of Brazilian music are well known, the starting point, the training, the first years remained till now in a vaguely legendary and imprecise blur. Thanks to many investigations that concern as many places as times, thanks to journeys back in time through the towns and regions, the film seeks the origins of Maria Bethânia’s voice and style. Helped and led by Bethânia herself, with the assistance of Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque, the two princes of Brazilian music, along with the complicity of the great Gilberto Gil, the author is allowed to go to the first context : the North-East. In the family home in Santo Amaro, the film finally touches the childhood of Maria Bethânia – and her brother Caetano, and this mysterious point – from which the music radiates.

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This film portrays the Quatuor Mosaïques from the first rehearsal of Beethoven's Quartet No. 14 opus 131 until the day of its premiere. Santiago's camera spies on the rehearsals and witnesses the meticulous analysis of the musicians deciphering the score. It is not a scholarly or virtuous film; is a passionate document about the perfectionism of technique

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In a house half devastated by a cataclysm, men and women take inventory of the sonic rubble of their memory during a musical ceremony.

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In Gibellina, in deep Sicily, the sumptuous staging, by Yannis Kokkos, of Oresteïa by Iannis Xenakis, after Aeschylus.

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Hugo Santiago and writers Juan José Saer and Jorge Semprún move back and forth between Paris and the city of Aquilea in a shadowy fable about exile. The frontier between one city and the other begins to blur after Bandoneonist Rodolfo Mederos is visited by his sister, a member of a guerrilla organization.

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Spinoza, attempting to discover why his son committed suicide, meets his girlfriend and his rival for her affections.

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Hearing the summons from an elderly man, a volunteer troop of middle-aged men gather to defend their country from dark foreign invaders.

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