Mario Jacob

A documentary film about the production and distribution of uruguayan militant cinema during the 60s

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After a long exile in Venezuela, filmmaker Mario Handler returns to his country, Uruguay. There, the dictatorship is still present in the media, public opinion, and in the memory of people. The director feels he owes something to the comrades, those who could not leave the country. This debt translates into poetry, black humor and conscience, in a sharp and accurate atmosphere of this dark time of Uruguay.

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One is a former police officer, bodyguard and hairdresser. Currently retired, he takes care of his extravagant and almost hundred-year-old illiterate mother. He writes poems and hopes to see them published one day. The other, a declared womanizer, workaholic, and leftist, was imprisoned during the dictatorship, runs a small grocery shop, and controls the life of his young second wife. Both were born in the Uruguayan hinterland during the Second World War, and share the same name as well as the fact that neither has wished to change it. The film is a tragicomic portrait of a country whose cultural diversity, its peculiar history and the character of its inhabitants allow the existence of exceptional and remarkable persons that depict a live picture of Uruguay, with its plurality and contradictions, its small and large history, without departing a single moment from irony or reflection.

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Ten years after the Law of Expiration, this documentary analyses the historical background of Uruguay's recent past. It is a survey of the controversy stirred up in society by the fact that, thanks to this law, the armed forces personnel and police who committed crimes under the dictatorship (1973-1985) have gone unpunished, and it examines the scars the authoritarian regime left on a section of the population.

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This documentary examines sexuality as seen by women and men born into Catholic families and educated at Catholic schools. These people talk about the Church's refusal to face reality and how this short-sightedness leads to lies, feelings of guilt, a block on eroticism, unwanted pregnancies, deaths resulting from illegal abortions, and ignorance about AIDS that in fact helps the disease to spread.

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Idea approaches the figure of Idea Vilariño, considered as one of the greatest Spanish-language female poets. Her literary work, especially her poetry, is acclaimed by critics and public alike, a rare case in the Uruguayan culture scene. With her own testimony, pictures, poems, songs and archive footage, this documentary offers an in-depth look at the essence of Idea Vilariño's poetic universe in a frank adherence to her literary and human posture. Her childhood, her ghosts, her desolate vision of a godless world, the stormy burden of suffering from her relationship with Juan Carlos Onetti and the commitment assumed with the issues of her time define the various facets of this woman.

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The engineer Eladio Dieste, the most innovative architect in Uruguay, is interviewed by the architect Mariano Arana. He talks about the ethical responsibility involved in creating, the idea that the things that surround us should be beautiful, and how important it is to use our intelligence and creativity to produce original responses and generate our own ways of thinking.

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Forty million people and countless species of flora and fauna depend on the rivers of the Rio de la Plata basin. But there is a development initiative, the Paraguay-Paraná Waterway Project, which aims to change the natural courses of these rivers and build a “Super Highway River” for the transport of grain and raw materials. If this project is implemented, what will the consequences be for society and for the environment?

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This documentary examines the problems of Uruguay's Atlantic coast in the face of a scheme to exploit the area's tourist resources that is not geared to sustainable development.

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A woman that is an excellent wife and mother, and responsible and efficient in her work, commits a shameful act pushed by fate.

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The community at Rincón de la Bolsa, just a few kilometres from Montevideo, is suffering from all kinds of environmental problems, and the local people organize and demand solutions.

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This is a marsh area in the very heart of the protected wetlands in the east of Uruguay, but today it has almost completely disappeared. A message in the Guaraní language, an "India Muerta" prayer, sounds the alarm about the dire consequences for nature of what human beings are doing.

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In the east of Uruguay there is a little-known region of vast wetlands in a beautiful natural setting which is a sanctuary for thousands of species of flora and fauna. Although it is officially protected, it is under threat from rice producers who are draining parts of the area.

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From an early age children are brought up very differently depending on their gender. The process of discovering the world is a veritable box of surprises in which school, the family and the media programme us about what it is to be a “good” girl or a “good” boy.

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This is the dramatic untold story of small farmers who suffer and struggle to subsist less than 80 kilometres from Montevideo. The reality of their daily lives is that the land is impoverished, middle men dominate the business, they cannot compete with firms that have new technology, and the market for their goods is small. They have to fight to survive in the wider context of the impact of regional integration - the Mercosur - and the world crisis that other countries are also going through.

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A long interview with Uruguay's greatest writer, in Madrid a few months before his death. From his bed, Onetti talks about literature, creativity, and his origins.

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The subject is women and their participation in politics, and this is used as a pretext for a humorous, provocative, female perspective on official (male) discourse and the almost nonexistent participation of women in Uruguayan politics.

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In 1988, the indebtedness of the land adjudicators of the National Colonization Institute faced a controversial refinancing law that made their subsistence unfeasible. The settlers envisioned an opaque future in which the depopulation of the campaign was going to worsen with more emigration and with the disappearance of more rural establishments.

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Free adaptation of the story “Muebles El Canario” by Felisberto Hernández, with Leo Maslíah in the leading role.

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