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.

Юная Ирис любит баскетбол и своих двоюродных братьев Дарио и Але. Подростки живут в одном из рабочих кварталов Корриентеса – города, расположенного на севере Аргентины. Их район трудно назвать благополучным. Школа не играет в жизни детей особой роли, их матери вечно заняты на работе, а отцов вообще нет на горизонте. Скрывать свою сексуальность тут тоже не принято. Дарио – открытый гей, Але – скорее бисексуален. К Ирис постоянно подкатывают местные парни, но ей нравится Рената – девушка с тёмным прошлым, которая совсем недавно вернулась в город после долгого отсутствия.

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.