Lena Esquenazi

Lena Esquenazi

Profile

Lena Esquenazi

Movies

The Echo
Sound Designer
In the remote village of El Echo that exists outside of time, the children care for the sheep and their elders. While the frost and drought punish the land, they learn to understand death, illness and love with each act, word and silence of their parents. A story about the echo of what clings to the soul, about the certainty of shelter provided by those around us, about rebellion and vertigo in the face of life. About growing up.
Manuela
Sound
The Substitute
Sound
Lucio, a prestigious university professor, takes the position of substitute teacher at a high school in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, where he grew up. Through tales, novels and poetry, he tries to distract his class from the harsh reality of their everyday lives. But soon, he must step out of his professional duties when Dilan, one of his students, is threatened by a local drug kingpin.
Daughter of Rage
Sound
Nicaragua, today. Eleven-year-old María lives with her mother Lilibeth on the edge of an immense rubbish dump. Their future depends on selling a litter of purebred puppies to a local gang member. When the deal falls through, Lilibeth has to move to the outskirts of the city and leave María to work at a recycling factory. The days go by with no sign of her mother's return. María feels abandoned, confused and angry. One night she meets Tadeo, a kind and romantic boy determined to help her find her mother.
Karnawal
Sound Effects Editor
During a carnival, near the border between Argentina and Bolivia, a young Malambo dancer prepares for the most important competition of his life. When his ex-felon father returns, he jeopardizes everything by dragging his son into the criminal world.
Karnawal
Sound Designer
During a carnival, near the border between Argentina and Bolivia, a young Malambo dancer prepares for the most important competition of his life. When his ex-felon father returns, he jeopardizes everything by dragging his son into the criminal world.
Karnawal
Sound
During a carnival, near the border between Argentina and Bolivia, a young Malambo dancer prepares for the most important competition of his life. When his ex-felon father returns, he jeopardizes everything by dragging his son into the criminal world.
Prayers for the Stolen
Sound Designer
In a mountain town, where corn and poppies grow, the girls wear boyish haircuts and have hiding places underground to escape the threat of being stolen. Ana and her two best friends grow up together, affirming the bonds of their friendship and discovering what it means to be women in a rural town marked by violence. Their mothers train them to flee death, to escape those who turn them into slaves or ghosts. They create their own impenetrable universe, but one day one of the girls doesn’t make it to her hiding place in time.
The Spokeswoman
Sound Designer
The Spokeswoman narrates the trip of María de Jesús Patricio, the first indigenous woman to run for president in Mexico, revealing the nature and complexity of racism and gender discrimination in a changing society.
Contactado
Sound Designer
An aging self-proclaimed prophet who revisits his past as a spiritual guru after an eager young follower entices him to return to preaching.
Monos
Sound Designer
On a faraway mountaintop, eight kids with guns watch over a hostage and a conscripted milk cow.
The Guardian of Memory
Sound Designer
According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Mexico became one of the deadliest conflict zones in the world in 2017, second only to Syria. In 2008, the Mexican government sent the army to Chihuahua on the Mexico-Texas border to fight drug traffickers. What seemed like an attempt to control the cartels turned into state-sponsored disappearances and the murder of journalists, human rights activists and civilians. The survivors and those threatened by the conflict pushed at the unwelcoming border of the United States, hoping for asylum. With stunning visual poetry, director Marcela Arteaga weaves together a record of their memories told over the backdrop of the once-vibrant landscape of the Juarez Valley. She also highlights the extraordinary work of Carlos Spector, an immigration lawyer born in El Paso, Texas, who fights to obtain political asylum for those Mexicans fleeing violence.
Tempestad
Sound Designer
A woman is recruited to a prison controlled by organized crime while another woman searches for her missing daughter. Through images that submerges us in a journey from north to south Mexico, both testimonies collide and take us to the center of a storm: a country where violence has taken control of our lives, our desires and our dreams.
Sunka Raku (Alegría Evanescente)
Sound Designer
It's a life told in four seasons. It is the orbit of a man who comes close to and steps back from the light, experiencing weather transformations in the garden of the soul. A documentary about the meticulous construction of Japanese tea houses in the Mexican Ajusco, as an excuse to discover a mind that at first glance might seem obsessive and eccentric.
Bad Hair
Sound Editor
A nine-year-old boy’s preening obsession with straightening his hair elicits a tidal wave of homophobic panic in his hard-working mother, in this tender but clear-eyed coming-of-age tale.
Ramón Ayala
Sound Designer
Marcos Lopez's first feature film explores the world and oeuvre of Argentine folk musician, Ramón Ayala. The movie also provides interviews with contemporary musicians from Argentina, who were influenced by Ayala. At the same time, the picture portrays the different landscapes of the country: the jungle and soil of Misiones (Ayala's native province), the folk festival in Córdoba and the urban environment of Buenos Aires; paying special attention to those places where Ayala's music circulate. One of the most famous Argentine photographers, Lopez takes advantage of the cinematographic medium to stamp his visual aesthetics, which offer a very ironic, yet loving, approach to Argentina.
Magic Words (to Break a Spell)
Sound
Documentary testimonial Nicaraguan-Spanish director Mercedes Moncada. It is not an autobiography, but it points to a very emotional perspective with the Nicaraguan revolution. Narrated in the first person, the documentary tells testimonial filmmaker's memories from his childhood, when the revolution broke up the "loss and betrayal" of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) to the political principles that had been erected.
Liniers, el trazo simple de las cosas
Music
Winter 2007. Two artists from Argentina receive a grant to develop their work in Montreal (Canada). The only catch? They have to share an apartment. In this way filmmaker Franca González and cartoonist Ricardo Siri Liniers come to know each other. From the moment González becomes the roommate of Liniers, a friendship emerges between them and she makes him the proposal of doing a documentary about him. The film starts with an argument to get Liniers permission to chase him with videocameras and ends up becoming one of the most tender portraits ever done of the artist, reflecting the transcendence that ensues from the simple line of his drawings.
Cobrador: In God We Trust
Sound
Adaptation and unification in a single story of several stories by the writer Rubem Fonseca, where the theme of violence in contemporary society is explored.
Stories of Disenchantment
Sound Designer
In a world devoured by an invisible force known as disenchantment, the stories of three characters intertwine: Diego, who tries to make a movie about the dreams of Ximena, an adolescent experiencing her sexual awakening, who is secretly in love with him and who, in order to help him in his bizarre project, leads him to Ainda, a conceptual artist with bat wings, with whom the naïve filmmaker falls madly in love. Ainda is attracted by the purity of the young people and seduces them both, which leads to a magical moment in the lives of all three. But soon the young people discover that their beloved harpy’s heart belongs to a being from beyond the grave. Then the idyllic relationship of the three characters begins to crumble and they do everything in their power to prevent it, as the dark force of disenchantment closes over the city.
El día menos pensado
Sound
Duck Season
Sound Designer
Flama and Moko are fourteen years old; they have been best friends since they were kids. They have everything they need to survive yet another boring Sunday: an apartment without parents, videogames, porn magazines, soft drinks and pizza delivery.
Papá Iván
Sound Designer
Dad Iván, is the testimony of the daughter of a Montonero guerilla leader that died during combat: Iván Roqué, the Iván in the title and father of the director. The documentary exposes in a moving way the difficult relationship between a daughter and her heroic, mythified father. At the same time it also becomes not only the reflection of a daughter but of an entire generation, about the feelings of abandoment, abscense, the tragedy, the exile and death. Feelings, ideas, dreams and facts are confronted. Tears are shed as much as admiration is expressed for the father, he is questioned as strongly as he is veneered.
Violet Perfume
Sound Designer
A poignant and moving urban drama, focusing on the growing problem of sexual assault in Mexico City. Director Sistach fictionalizes the true story of a friendship between two adolescent girls which is torn apart when one of them is brutally raped.
Crónica de un desayuno
Sound Designer
A view of the end-of-the-century Mexican family. A father who comes back home after a long absence, but who would rather be somewhere else. A daughter suffering from a trapped pain. A son full of guilt and recriminations. A little kid who soaks up all the tension in the house, like a sponge, and a self-effacing mother who would like to go away and leave everything behind.
Cuentos chinos
Sound Recordist
The history of Chinese migration to Mexico, from its birth at the start of the twentieth century, through the Mexican revolution, the anti-Chinese movement, and up to the current state of Chinese migrants in the country. A documentary about xenophobia in Mexico and the search for identity of a group of people caught between two cultures.
Cilantro and Parsley
Sound
"Cilantro y perejil" is a comedy about couples from the same family, hit by the economic crisis in Mexico. The plot turns around the eternal question of whether it is worth it to live as a couple. The conclusions are fun, unpredictable and very human. After ending a ten-year marriage, Carlos and Susana try to fall in love with other people without success. As the days go by, Carlos realizes that without Susana he is unable to do many things, including distinguishing cilantro from parsley.
Por si no te vuelvo a ver
Sound Designer
Five elderly men form a music group and run away from the nursing home where they are interns with the hope of playing for an audience. They confront th city, the nursing home authorities, the police and all those who wish to destroy their dream which finally comes true when they are contracted to serve as musical background for strippers of a second class cabaret. In case i never see you again, is a movie about life, death, melancholy and the quest for happiness.
Straight to Heaven
Sound
Two girls in love are going to discover that a bus can take you from a traffic jam in Mexico City to a celestial place.