LIVERPOOL Showcase Argentina

Lisandra Alonso, writer-director of LA LIBERTAD and LOS MUERTOS and one of the key figures of New Argentine Cinema, elevates his austere, meditative style to poetic, provocative new levels with this tale of a loner adrift both at sea and in his life. LIVERPOOL follows the story of Farrel (Juan Fernandez), a sailor who, having traveled from one end of the earth to the other, asks the captain of the freighter he works on for permission to go ashore once they reach the port of Ushuolo, the southernmost town in Argentina. Farrel wants to return to his birthplace and see if his mother is still olive. Like characters who inhabit other Alonso films-the woodcutter in LA LIBERTAD and the convict traversing the jungle in LOS MUERTOS Farrel is a solitary man. He drinks to oblivion, pays the women he sleeps with and has no friends. With a head full of dork memories, he treks through the endless snow, discovering his mother and a port of himself On e of the few living directors whose filmography represents a kind of subgenre, Alonso takes the techniques of observational cinema and invests them with insight and surprisingly wrenching emotion.