The boundlessly playful and inventive films of Argentine director Gastón Solnicki (Kékszakállú, Introduzione all’oscuro) have been a delight to witness these last few years. Earlier in 2022, the director premiered his latest work, the portrait of Vienna A Little Love Package, at Berlinale and now, ahead of the film’s Austrian release on November 18th, we’re pleased to premiere the exclusive trailer. Featuring Angeliki Papoulia, Carmen Chaplin, and Mario Bellatin, the film will also play at the Viennale, La Roche Sur Yon, Warsaw, Thessaloniki, IDFA, ICA, and Porto Post Doc.
“A Little Love Package is a film in which I wished to pursue my filmic transition, in the sense of working with materials inherently related to a certain tradition of narrative filmmaking, though still invested in a documentary register and the epiphany of the unexpected – which has always felt very natural to me. For the first time, I made a film based on a more preconceived structure, a certain kind of dramatic arc and its corresponding characterlogical subjects,” the director said. “I have always been under a certain spell in regards to Vienna, ever since I first visited as a little boy. It is my ideal location, my cinematic paradise. A city out of time, so plenty of layers. An architecture that is very distant from my Argentine life, yet so familiar.”
Rory O’Connor said in his review, “In A Little Love Package, Vienna’s institutions, people, buildings, and overlapping epochs make for a stiff drink: a bright, effervescent, lightly intoxicating film easily downed in one. The director is Gastón Solnicki, a nicely ruminative Buenos Aires filmmaker whose make-it-up-as-you-go approach (often shooting without a script, the plot revealing itself organically) allows his films to meander. Solnicki’s work has a playful spirit: it’s episodic both in form and content, though never amorphous; and he moves between narrative, documentary, still imagery, and immersive sound with seamless élan. Forged in lockdown, Love Package is a breezy collage of meteorites and cigarettes; cheese and boiled eggs, and how best to make them. But at heart it’s about how eras end, what they leave behind, and how new ones begin.”
See the exclusive trailer below.
