Argentine director Agustina Pérez Rial’s debut feature-length film about the ninth edition of the International Film Festival in her native city of Mar del Plata from 1968 seems to find an uncommonly balanced solution to the primal dilemma of documentary storytelling. In an impressively brilliant montage of archive material, a story is constructed which, according to the director herself, is not necessarily true, but realistic.

Historical black and white photos of captivating beauty, film footage from various sources and documents from the now open archives of the surveillance authorities of the time are counteracted by a supposed witness report – de facto a female voice from offscreen. Pérez Rial is in subtle and intelligent control of her cinematic tools, pulling out all the stops: documentary and fiction, historical and contemporary, aesthetic, trivia and anecdotes. On the one hand, the meticulously researched facts unearth a forgotten microfacet of the Cold War, complete with militarisation, persecution and paranoia. On the other hand, they show a film festival as a node of ideologies and describe it as a highly politicised place. This opens unexpected spaces of reflection for the role assigned to such a cultural event – historical or current.