Paris-based sales agency and production company Luxbox has released the trailer for “Trenque Lauquen,” Argentine director-producer Laura Citarella’s adventure mystery that has its world premiere Sept. 8 in the Horizons sidebar of the Venice Film Festival. Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer, which can be seen below.
Filmed in two parts, Citarella’s fourth feature begins with a pair of men both searching for a woman who has mysteriously vanished. While one of them claims to be her boyfriend, the other has also forged an intimate bond with the missing woman, with a series of flashbacks revealing that he’s also fallen in love with her.
The disappearance exposes more secrets, including the secret of another woman who vanished decades ago; the secret of a town where a supernatural incident remains a mystery; and the secret of the plains where the lost woman wandered.
“Trenque Lauquen,” which means “round lake or lagoon” in the Mapuche language, refers to the last town where the woman was seen.
Citarella said in a director’s statement that “Trenque Lauquen” is one among a group of films, beginning with her feature debut “Ostende,” that follow the same character living different lives in different towns. “What crosses the whole saga is a central idea: a female Sherlock Holmes of sorts lost in towns, keener for adventures than anything else,” she said.
“A film composed by different kind of women. Women who chase women. Female detectives. Female Scientifics. Women that, for different reasons, run away. The cartographies of books as maps to live. Maternity. The conquest of territory. Men in love. The nobility of some men. The idiocy of the same men. The bureaucracy and the flowers. The town. The humans. The animals. The plants. The unknown,” she continued.
Written by Citarella and lead actress Laura Paredes, “Trenque Lauquen” is co-produced by El Pampero Cine, which Citarella joined in 2005, and German distributor Grandfilm.
Upon acquiring rights to the film this week, Luxbox’s Fiorella Moretti and Hedi Zardi described it as “a film of adventures and mysteries, love and nature that invites the viewer to unveil each layer of the different stories that intersect in time.”