THE ROAD TO SAN DIEGO

15 February Wednesday 19:00 29 February Wednesday 19:00

Director: Carlos Sorín
Cast: Ignacio Benítez, Carlos Wagner La Bella, Paola Rotela, Silvina Fontelles
Argentina, 2006, 98’, color
Spanish with Turkish subtitles

Argentinean director Carlos Sorín has made a name for himself as the foremost fictional chronicler of his country’s dreamers and drifters. His Historias Mínimas and Bombón: El Perro are road trips through the eccentric heart of the Argentine countryside, revealing more of the region’s hopes and travails—and remarkable landscapes—than a hundred documentaries. The Road to San Diego is possibly his most audience-friendly work to date, a clever take on celebrity worship, pseudo-documentaries and, most of all, soccer. Living in the forgotten northern edge of Argentina, the backcountry woodsman Tati has one obsession: soccer star Diego Maradona. He has the player’s number tattooed on his back, and even has taught his parrots to chime out, "Maradona." When he discovers that the legendary footballer is hospitalized in Buenos Aires—a victim of his notorious drug, food and alcohol addictions—Tati decides to journey to the capital in order to give his idol a restorative root that he finds in a forest and carves into Maradona’s likeness. Sorín fashions Tati’s path from backcountry to big city as an odyssey through modern Argentina, complete with sirens, doubters and heroes, all struggling to survive in the face of the country’s very real economic crisis. Humorous and lighthearted, but well-grounded in Argentine realities, The Road to San Diego is that rarest of "social comment" films, full of tenderness rather than spite, and beauty instead of bile.