Gertrudis: Mirta Bogdasarian
Jean Baptise: Patrick Dell’Isola
León Cohen: Fernando Armani
Nathan: Carlos Defeo
Eva: Silvina Bosco
Camera Obscura, a film based on the short story of the same name by Angélica Gorodischer, invites us from the title itself—which refers to an ancient painting technique, the most primitive form of photography—to enter the singular universe of the human gaze, and the mysterious process of its creation.
In a colony of Jewish immigrants in Entre Ríos Province, Argentina, at the end of the 19th Century, we discover the story of Gertrudis, a woman who in the eyes of her family was born an ugly baby, grew up into a not very pretty child and finally became, in the eyes of everyone around her, an insignificant, almost invisible woman. Ignored by all, Gertrudis does not let the fact interfere with her keen interest for those delicate, minuscule signs of beauty that surround us, and that we can only perceive if we stop to contemplate them.
Years later, when she’s married with children, a French photographer arrives at Gertrudis’s farm and becomes the only one to discover, through his special “gaze,” Gertrudis’s singular beauty and her intense inner world.
Through this artist, who takes part in the Surrealist movement, which reinvented a new form of beauty in art, Gertrudis begins to “see” herself for the first time.
Camera Obscura, a film that reflects on the erratic laws of beauty, acceptance and reject. What we see through our eyes—or perhaps what we miss, when we think we see.
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