Gustavo Fontán

Movies

The Bus Station
Director
Bathed in the half-light, a bus station north of Cordoba in Argentina. Waiting, and the arrivals and departures of the local buses punctuate the lives of these workers and travellers. Far from making an observational documentary, Gustavo Fontán crafts the ghostly portrait of a place of transit where the traces of those who bring it alive resonate and are muffled, blending mystery with everyday life.
El piso del viento
Writer
A couple builds a space to live. When it is finished, before inhabiting it, they invite a group of people to visit it. The invited people circulate individually through this new and empty space. They look, they walk, they talk. The film tries to rescue the effect of that experience in each one of them. So the space itself becomes an experience. What will they leave of themselves? What will they take? What will they show of the human? What is a house? What do you do with the past? The series of people who briefly inhabit that place, recently built, still free of all traces, could be thought of as infinite. The space fills and empties. The residual of that transit remains: a luminous fragility.
El piso del viento
Director
A couple builds a space to live. When it is finished, before inhabiting it, they invite a group of people to visit it. The invited people circulate individually through this new and empty space. They look, they walk, they talk. The film tries to rescue the effect of that experience in each one of them. So the space itself becomes an experience. What will they leave of themselves? What will they take? What will they show of the human? What is a house? What do you do with the past? The series of people who briefly inhabit that place, recently built, still free of all traces, could be thought of as infinite. The space fills and empties. The residual of that transit remains: a luminous fragility.
Luz de agua
Screenplay
"Several times a day, for many months, I went out to the terrace of my house to look at the terrace next door, which is the terrace of a nursing home. I went out as soon as I got up and before going to bed, as in a ritual. And soon, over the course of the weeks, I went out several times a day to look at that space, a window between two concrete blocks, a mysterious door, the light on the ceilings." (Gustavo Fontán)
Luz de agua
Camera Operator
"Several times a day, for many months, I went out to the terrace of my house to look at the terrace next door, which is the terrace of a nursing home. I went out as soon as I got up and before going to bed, as in a ritual. And soon, over the course of the weeks, I went out several times a day to look at that space, a window between two concrete blocks, a mysterious door, the light on the ceilings." (Gustavo Fontán)
Luz de agua
Director
"Several times a day, for many months, I went out to the terrace of my house to look at the terrace next door, which is the terrace of a nursing home. I went out as soon as I got up and before going to bed, as in a ritual. And soon, over the course of the weeks, I went out several times a day to look at that space, a window between two concrete blocks, a mysterious door, the light on the ceilings." (Gustavo Fontán)
Jardín de piedra
Director of Photography
"During several months of this senseless year I went out to the terrace to look at the ceilings. I would go at different times of the day, as in a ritual, perhaps trying to find at those ceilings some kind of explanation. Something that mitigates grief." (Gustavo Fontán)
Jardín de piedra
Director
"During several months of this senseless year I went out to the terrace to look at the ceilings. I would go at different times of the day, as in a ritual, perhaps trying to find at those ceilings some kind of explanation. Something that mitigates grief." (Gustavo Fontán)
The Debt
Writer
Mónica did not make a client's payments of the office where she works. The missing 15K pesos not only commit her but also a colleague, who is the one who discovers the fault. It seems that is not the first time that this happens, but the colleague, despite his anger, kept silence and chose to believe her again: Mónica commits to replenish the sum of money the next morning.
The Debt
Director
Mónica did not make a client's payments of the office where she works. The missing 15K pesos not only commit her but also a colleague, who is the one who discovers the fault. It seems that is not the first time that this happens, but the colleague, despite his anger, kept silence and chose to believe her again: Mónica commits to replenish the sum of money the next morning.
Sol en un patio vacío
Director
Lluvias
Director
Between two rains, a film that is offered as a newspaper. Rains. It is night. The rain coils like a snake in the street lanterns. A neighbor, old lady, knocks on my door. It's eleven at night. She is desperate, ask for rivotril. A few days later he dies. Someone leaves their house. Objects are loaded coldly in a truck. The death of a neighbor, a move, the skies laden with clouds, the light on things and faces, the operation of an old man, a night trip ... It rains. The trees shake and tremble underwater. Between two rains, a look at human fragility.
El estanque
Director
A journey through everyday’s life. Streets, squares, zoos, houses, roofs, men, women, roads, but all of it seen as if that world was someone else's, as if it was lost in time. The world is there, but there is no place to settle. A film that speaks about everyday’s life, but with the voice of the sleepwalkers. Some sort of blind, nocturnal continuum that no one knows for sure what it is.
El limonero real
Director
Based on the novel by Argentine poet Juan José Saer, Gustavo Fontán’s beautiful film observes, over the course of a single day, three interrelated families who live around the Parana River. Wenceslao (Germán de Silva of Las acacias and Wild Tales) blames himself for his son’s death six years prior, but attempts to get his still-grieving wife to attend her sister’s New Year’s Eve party; she refuses, even after her nieces and other sisters join in the effort. Throughout, DP Diego Poleri captures the golden-hued radiance of the river during the day as spellbindingly as he does the charcoal-tinted night. -from http://www.filmlinc.org/
El día nuevo
Writer
El día nuevo
Director
Intervened Events
Director
The omnibus feature SUCESOS INTERVENIDOS consists of shorts by a who’s who of Argentine documentary and experimental-film giants, including Edgardo Cozarinsky and Gustavo Fontán but also Claudio Caldini, Andrés Di Tella and Gabriela Golder. Each one of them created a piece of a few minutes in length using archival footage from SUCESOS ARGENTINOS (“Argentine Events”), a popular newsreel series from 1938 to 1972 whose episodes have recently begun to be digitized by Buenos Aires’s “Pablo C. Ducrós Hicken” Film Museum.
El rostro
Director
A man in a small boat reaches an island on the Paraná River. He heads towards a site where there used to be a house or small village. Now there is nothing. Slight signs of something old and lost: the place where he was born. His presence allows the things in the abandoned spot to materialize: huts and tables, animals and canoes. Soon others arrive on the island: his wife, father, friends, and children. This is a meeting of the Man and his loved ones. With the dead, the birds, the river's music and his pain.
La casa
Director
In the house where several gererations used to live no one is living anymore At least apparently. Because if any one intensifies hearing and view, he can see He sees the footprints of formers inhabitants. He sees the marks of life and death in the deserted spaces He is the witness of the persistence of voices , bodies, ligths and shadows.
April elegy
Producer
The poet Salvador Merlino didn’t live to see published April’s elegy, his last book, as he died when it was still in the printing press. His daughter Mary (72) and his son, Carlos (74), kept the parcels of copies of their father’s book stashed away for 50 years, high up, on top of a wardrobe. The curiosity of young Federico will force them to come face to face with themselves.
April elegy
Writer
The poet Salvador Merlino didn’t live to see published April’s elegy, his last book, as he died when it was still in the printing press. His daughter Mary (72) and his son, Carlos (74), kept the parcels of copies of their father’s book stashed away for 50 years, high up, on top of a wardrobe. The curiosity of young Federico will force them to come face to face with themselves.
April elegy
Director
The poet Salvador Merlino didn’t live to see published April’s elegy, his last book, as he died when it was still in the printing press. His daughter Mary (72) and his son, Carlos (74), kept the parcels of copies of their father’s book stashed away for 50 years, high up, on top of a wardrobe. The curiosity of young Federico will force them to come face to face with themselves.
La madre
Writer
La madre
Director
The Shore That Falls
Screenplay
La orilla que se Abisma is conceived as a journey, a trip along a river. Like rivers, like all journeys, the film has meanders, small riverbeds, detours and moments of rest.
The Shore That Falls
Director
La orilla que se Abisma is conceived as a journey, a trip along a river. Like rivers, like all journeys, the film has meanders, small riverbeds, detours and moments of rest.
El árbol
An elderly couple debates whether to cut down an ancient acacia tree that has witnessed the major memories of our lives.
El árbol
Writer
An elderly couple debates whether to cut down an ancient acacia tree that has witnessed the major memories of our lives.
El árbol
Director
An elderly couple debates whether to cut down an ancient acacia tree that has witnessed the major memories of our lives.
Donde cae el sol
Producer
A story between a 65 years old man and a woman who is thirty years younger that him. The film, explores the human relationships through fully identifiable human beings, taking also into account the prejudices, the lust of life and all those everyday defeats.
Donde cae el sol
Screenplay
A story between a 65 years old man and a woman who is thirty years younger that him. The film, explores the human relationships through fully identifiable human beings, taking also into account the prejudices, the lust of life and all those everyday defeats.
Donde cae el sol
Director
A story between a 65 years old man and a woman who is thirty years younger that him. The film, explores the human relationships through fully identifiable human beings, taking also into account the prejudices, the lust of life and all those everyday defeats.
The Southern Cross
Writers' Assistant
Nora and Javier have been hired to transport a shipment of cocaine in an ambulance. With the help of Wendy, Javier's transvestite brother, they rob a part of the shipment and escape from the police. Moulded by loneliness, indifference and a lack of communication, Nora, Javier and Wendy are three youths with no future who move on the outer rim of society and are helpless in the face of a corrupt power. They hide in El Marquesado, a seaside resort built by the military on dynamited cliffs where Rodolfo and Mercedes, Javier and Wendy's parents, survive by rustling pigs and cows from neighbouring farms. The conflicts and tensions in this marginal family resurface as they are reunited in this remote place with a sinister past.
La fe del volcán
Production Design
Árboles y pájaros
Director