Jessica Sarah Rinland visits zoological gardens across Argentina to craft a portrait not of a single institution, but rather its underlying concept: an observational, yet still ever-probing exploration of zoo itself. The different types of image and their textures she collects to this end—the silky 16mm that comprises the bulk of the film, the crisp surveillance footage, the grainy black-and-white cameras that capture creatures roving “undisturbed”, the yellowing photographs that pin down Indigenous people and animals alike – perfectly correspond to the varying perspectives she gathers on her subject: a place of imprisonment and colonial legacy, but now also one of everyday routine, conservation and even tenderness.
For all the ambivalence of its central theme, this is, like all of Rinland’s work, a film of extraordinary tactility: Human hands that clean, catalogue and caress, leathery trunks and furry fingers that reach between iron bars in search of comfort, plumage glistening in the sun. Jean Piaget coined the term collective monologue to refer to the developmental phase in which the child believes nature is created for them alone and can be controlled as such. It is so strangely moving to see control give way to care.

Luciano cuts a slight figure as he wanders through the narrow streets of the improvised Barrio Tablada on the edge of Rosario, taking care of his mother and sister and the makeshift home they share, finding occasional work on building sites as the search for a proper job continues, lifting weights at the gym. Manuel Besedovsky lays out the different episodes of this precarious, if not atypical existence with such deliberate deemphasis that it feels almost like a plot twist when Luciano meets with a consultant to talk about the various options for constructing a penis. And yet this part of Luciano’s experience has actually been there all along – another thread woven often imperceptibly into the fabric of the film with gentleness and care.
Handing CVs out, hormone injections, smoking joints with buddies from the neighbourhood, talking to his mother about the daughter that is no longer there, some slightly awkward rapping, thinking about having children – the most radical thing about this portrait is how each challenge, each diversion, each encounter is presented with the same sense of normality with which Luciano experiences it. Class, gender identity and their seldom-seen intersection shown as nothing more than getting on with life.