Armin Marchesini Weihmuller

Julia returns to her hometown and the neighbourhood she left years ago after being swindled. She’s here to sign a permit to authorize her daughter to move in with her father, but more than anything, she’s come back to recover money that she left there, and which would solve a lot of her problems. Returning to her past is nothing like she expected it to be.

아르헨티나 북부 코리엔테스 지방, 라스밀(Las Mil)이라는 작은 마을을 배경으로 펼쳐지는 우정, 사랑, 힘의 관계를 보여준다. 감독은 영화 배경이 되는 지역의 역사나 정치적 상황을 전면에 드러내거나 일절 설명하지 않는다. 하지만 부재를 통해 실제 부재했던 힘을 묘사하는 방식으로, 영화 속에 어떤 공적인 힘도 등장하지 않게 함으로써 실제 정치권력이 수년간 주민들을 방치한 결과를 약물과 빈곤을 통해 드러낸다. 시나리오는 지방 생활의 관습을 보여주는 많은 이야기 속에서 이리스와 레나타 사이의 사랑 이야기를 탄생시킨다.

On July 2nd, 2008, at five thirty in the afternoon, a 53-year-old man called Jean-Michel was run over by a train in Saint-Lyé, a town with a population of 3,000 located in the east of France. No one knew whether it was a suicide or an accident. The director investigates around the town, asks different inhabitants what they think of that tragedy. For many people, Jean-Michel had killed himself, after amassing too many worries and problems; the more the voiceover asks, the more mysterious it all gets. But there is a detail from Jean-Michel’s life that connects him to Argentina—he had been an employee at a phone company until a privatization left him without a job. (In)Voluntary Retirements is a documentary that shows how the kinship between Argentina’s politics in the ‘90s and France’s twenty years later damaged the lives of so many people.