Lost Embrace by Daniel Burman

The New Argentines
Rukhsana Yasmin asks Lost Embrace (EL ABRAZO PARTIDO) Director Daniel Burman what it takes to be a member of the New Wave of Argentine filmmakers.

El Abrazo Partido: Lost Embrace
Daniel Burman's Lost Embrace is set mostly in a small shopping mall in Buenos Aires and whilst a little bleak, and representative of Ariel’s (Daniel Hendler) frustrated dreams, it is also brimming full of characters wholesome and candid, each with their own stories adding to this carefully crafted script.

The film follows Ariel’s search for his own identity through his Polish-Jewish roots and seeks to understand why his father left for Israel shortly after he was born, never to return. Burman's film looks humorously and tenderly at the everyday lives of the multi-ethnic immigrant communities that make up Argentina and the second generation forging themselves a new identity.

Prosaic, glib, hilarious and smart Lost Embrace is often likened to a Woody Allen film, but I’d like to add, it is more sharp and real, Lost Embrace if anything is fresher, more urgent and real than any Allen film I remember.

The identity-search and dual nationality question faced by second-generation immigrants is treated with a touching sense of humour. Ariel belongs to a new citizenship and it is this political backdrop that informs the film without weighing it down with lectures that has been likened to a ‘new wave’ in Argentine Cinema. Like his contemporaries Lucrecia Martel, director of La Ciénaga (The Swamp), and Fabian Bielinsky, who wrote and directed Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens) Burman is adept at talking politics without overtly referring to them. Ariel is lost and looking to escape to Europe via Poland and tries to get a Polish passport made. The scene where he is interviewed at the Polish Home Office is hilarious and his fickle reasons for applying for citizenship is held up as shallow and insubstantial on it’s own - Ariel admires Polish citizens ‘like the Pope’ he says but cannot pronounce his name – put together with his search for his father and his own moral dilemma the audience sees a lost Ariel looking for hope.

Burman explains the construction of identity through Ariel as one that “obsesses me.” Adding, “there is something in Ariel’s life that determines his way of looking at things; a heroic father who abandoned his family to pursue an ideal, an unbearable moral dilemma, an obsessive thought that binds him. Yet the truth changes, as does everything else around him. His father returns, with new facts and with another story that will soon be Ariel’s as well. In Lost Embrace, I try to show the road that leads toward the construction of an identity, one based upon small anecdotes, tragedies and comic events, as well as on truths and lies.”

Daniel Burman - Director
Born in Buenos Aires in 1973, Daniel Burman is one of the most talented young filmmakers of today’s New Argentine Cinema. He began his work as a filmmaker in 1993 with the documentary En Que Estación Estamos which was awarded the UNESCO Honorary Mention. In 1995 he launched his own production company together with Diego Dubcovsky, BD CINE, and produced his first feature-length picture as a director, A Chrysanthemum Burst in Cincoesquinas at the age of 22. The film was selected for the Berlin and Sundance festivals, and was also shown at the Montreal, Biarritz, San Sebastian, Chicago, Havan film festivals and elsewhere. Burman followed this with Waiting for the Messiah, a film delving into the conflicts faced by a young Jewish man caught between traditional family ties and a desire to explore unlimited horizons. Much of Waiting for the Messiah takes place in the El Once neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, a traditionally Jewish enclave that is home to the largest Jewish community in Latin America. It was first shown in Europe at the 57th Venice International Film Festival and has been seen at the international film festivals of Toronto, Tokyo, Thessalonica and Sao Paulo. It was awarded the Grand Prix du Public at Biarritz, the FIPRESCI prize in Valladolid, the Coral-Best Film Prize in Havana and the Best Actor Award at the Buenos Aires Film Festival.

Burman, himself of Polish Jewish descent, produced Seven Days in Once, which details everyday life in this neighbourhood and follows its transformation from its origins to life in the aftermath of the 1994 attacks on the AMIA, its principal community center. Burman followed these productions with the feature Every Stewardess Goes To Heaven which garnered the Best Script Award at the Sundance/NHK Competition in 2001. The film was also shown at the 2002 Berlinale. In 2002 Burman co-produced Walter Salles’s film The Motorcycle Diaries and took part in the production of Swimming Alone, an Argentine film by the new-generation director Ezequiel Acuña. The following year he produced and directed his fourth feature, Lost Embrace, which was backed by Cinemart, Canal + España and the Fond Sud Cinema. As part of the official competition of the Berlin Film Festival 2004, Lost Embrace won the Silver Bear for Best Film and the Silver Bear for Best Actor (Daniel Hendler).

Below follows a Q + A with Daniel Burman:

Why filmmaking?
I don’t know why I took this up.
I had read that in their childhood, film directors had seen a movie that determined their calling for the rest of their lives. This didn’t happen to me at all. When I was a boy, I dreamt of being a lawyer like my parents, and to have an office full of books and paper. Later I started to dream of being a surgeon, to be a person who puts his hands into people to save their life, but I never imagined that I would make films.

It’s been a long time since I’ve asked myself why I do what I do. Every now and then I have doubts, particularly after finishing a film. The other day I sat down and watched Lost Embrace for the first time. When it was over, I felt a strange tickling sensation in my body. It was as if someone were tickling me in the stomach, a feeling of contained joy, like when you feel like laughing without wanting anyone to notice or a sensation of happiness without any apparent reason.

I now think that, in the end, all of this confusion was nothing more than that: I was looking for that tickling in my stomach and I had to make films in order to find it.

On “Lost Embrace”:

The construction of identity is an issue that obsesses me. I began exploring it in my second movie, Waiting for the Messiah, and took up the issue again in this project.

Ariel is a ‘late adolescent’ who lives in present-day Argentina, within a confusing a decadent
environment, where everything he knows keeps changing into something else in his desperate search for survival. In this process of transformation, many people look back to their origins. It is not to reaffirm their identity, however, but to pursue ‘bureaucratic’ ends: they want to obtain a passport from a remote ancestor’s country of origin in order to enter the European paradise, a place where hope is still possible. But there is something in his life that determines his way of looking at things; a heroic father who abandoned his family to pursue an ideal, an unbearable moral dilemma, an obsessive thought that binds him.

Yet the truth changes, as does everything else around him. His father returns, with new facts and with another story that will soon be Ariel’s as well. In Lost Embrace, I try to show the road that leads toward the construction of an identity, one based upon small anecdotes, tragedies and comic events, as well as on truths and lies.

Lost Embrace draws on Ariel’s background as a Polish-Jewish second generation immigrant to Argentina, which as a second generation immigrant in London myself holds some very interesting parallels, and I understand that this is your background – this is a very personal story, is it autobiographical?

I myself am of Polish-Jewish descent. But my movies are never autobiographical. However, the thoughts and reflections of the characters are very often my own, and although I did not necessarily went through the same path or experiences of the characters, their thoughts are my own. I write hypothetical stories based on those thoughts and reflections.

If yes, Lost Embrace is your fourth film, why did you choose now to make a film about your own experiences and not earlier – was this a conscious decision?

Fighting one's own prudishness about sharing and using one's own personal experiences as raw material takes time and it's not easy. WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH (Esperando al Mesias), the first of the trilogy and my second film, was the first of my films to explore in such way the micro world of El Once (The Eleventh), Buenos Aires Jewish quarter, and the issue of identity.

Lost Embrace has been likened to Woody Allen’s earlier films, but I found your film far more ‘real’, and personal. You use a hand-held camera a lot, and divided the film into segments by using in-title cards without taking away from the overall flow of the storytelling, why was this?
The comparison with Woody Allen is a great honour, if a bit exaggerated. I have great admiration for him as an 'auteur' and filmmaker, and for his body of work.
The segmentation in LOST EMBRACE has all to do with the literary spirit with which the storyline was conceived, and the deliberate fragmentation of its narration which was intended to mirror the film aesthetically and give it its structure.

The identity-search and dual nationality question faced by second generation immigrants is treated with a touching sense of humour. Ariel belongs to a new citizenship and it is this political backdrop which informs the film without weighing it down with lectures that has been likened to a ‘new wave’ in Argentine Cinema, is this a justified description of what ‘new wave’ argentine cinema is all about? I
I think that the cinema in Argentina is constantly reinventing or transforming itself and new directors who love to make a certain kind of movies are constantly rising. I find this really encouraging and positive….Indeed, there is a movement called ‘El Nuevo Cine Argentino’ (New Argentine Cinema), which I am said to be part of.

You have been ‘branded’ part of the ‘new wave’ of Argentine film makers, is this a fair description? And what does this mean to you?
Yes, I think that is a fair description. Not because of my aesthetic or narrative way of telling stories, but because of the way I make movies.

How do you see Argentinean Cinema in the past, now and in the future?
Argentinean cinema is progressing very much. There are new laws that help a lot produce movies, which is very positive and used to be unthinkable in the past. But I am worried about two issues: first, it is impossible to make films only with financing from Argentina, one has to go look for international financing. The other thing that really worries me is the very little support that Argentinean cinema receives from TV networks. It is unbelievable, but it is so much easier to sell a movie to other countries than it is to sell it to a local TV network…

Daniel Hendler plays Ariel to great effect, was the character written with Hendler in mind, or was casting done at a later time?
I wrote it with him in mind .

You recently finished your latest film Derecho de Familia (Family Law), which opened last month in Argentina and has broken all box office records of any Argentinean film in the last decade. At the moment, how easy/difficult is it to get a film made in Argentina?
It was not hard to get financing because of the success of LOST EMBRACE. But it is always with the support of foreign financing that films can be achieved and it would be great to have some support from local TV.

Which film makers have influenced you the most?
Woody Allen, Truffaut….

Filmography: As Director
2003 Lost Embrace
2002 Seven Days in Once – Documentary
Every Stewardess Goes to Heaven
2000 Waiting for the Messiah
1997 A Chrysanthemum Burst In Cincoesquinas

As Producer:
2003 Swimming Alone (Director: Ezequiel Acuña)
The Motorcycle Diaries (Director: Walter Salles)
2002 Smokers Only (Director: Verónica Chen)
2000 Fuckland – Dogma 95 No. 8 (Director: José Luis Marqués)
Los Libros y la Noche (Director: Tristán Bauer)
1999 Hidden River (Director: Mercedes García Guevara)
Garage Olimpo (Director: Marco Bechis)
1998 Plaza de Almas (Director: Fernando Díaz)

Prizes for Lost Embrace
Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Film and Silver Bear for Best Actor (Daniel Hendler), Berlin
International Film Festival 2004
Best Film, Bangkok World Film Festival 2004
Winner of the Canal Plus (Spain) Award for Best Unpublished Script
Winner of the Sociadad General de Autores Español Award at the Havana Film Festival 2003