Argentina’s Tarea Fina, a producer on Cannes Camera d’Or winner “Las Acacias,” International Oscar entry “The Sleepwalkers” and Ventana Sur hit “Sublime,” has boarded “A Loose End,” the third feature as a director from Uruguay’s Daniel Hendler, a Berlin Silver Bear winner for Best Actor in Daniel Burman’s 2004 international breakout “The Lost Embrace.”
Set up at Montevideo’s Cordon Films, founded in 2007 by producer-TV director Micaela Solé and Hendler, “A Loose End” (“Un cabo suelto”) is one of the highest-profile projects announced on Monday by the San Sebastián Festival as part of its Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum, its industry centerpiece.
Written by Hendler, his third directorial outing returns to a central theme in his first two features as a writer-director: Identity.In his 2011 debut, “Norberto’s Deadline,” a loserreal estate agent discovers his true calling and more confidence as an actor.
2017’s “The Candidate,” a Miami Festival best director winner, sees a millionaire presidential candidate with no ideological convictions – “I’d rather be “I’d rather be extremely left-wing or right-wing than in the center” he says – bringing in a team of advisors to create his public persona.
“A Loose End” turns on Santiago, a lowl-ranking policeman, who arrives in Fray Bentos, a small town just across the Uruguay border from Argentina,escaping from the Argentine police force. Penniless but with enough cunning and using his threadbare uniform, he overcomes obstacles, receives the help of local characters, aims to erase all traces of his past and even dreams of finding the possible love of his life.
“It is a film about the hope of changing destiny and, at the same time, the difficulty of achieving that utopia of diluting the limits of the territory,” said Hendler and Solé.
“The border, that between places in which the story is framed, is much more than a geographical circumstance: it is the impossibility of escaping from our own limits. Our protagonist, in his furtive illusion of camouflaging himself and becoming another will only find a possible shelter in love,” they added.
Like “The Candidate,” “A Loose End” questions dominate Hollywood narratives of successful goal achievement while shunting from one genre to another – an ACAU Uruguay jury described the filmas part “Western, romcom, road movie and procedural.”
“A Loose End” is also likely to be sluiced by Hendler’s hallmark bathetic humor – what he calls the interplay between “down-to-earth-ness and delusions of grandeur, things with which I can also identify in myself.”
“We have previously co-produced projects with Micaela and worked with Daniel as an actor in several films, which made me want to collaborate on ‘A Loose End’ as soon as they invited me and sent me the script,” said Miller. “I feel that it deals with issues that resonate with me from the particular perspective of Daniel whose work as a director I have always enjoyed.”
Cordón Films’ third consecutive feature co-produced with Tarea Fina, the just-closed alliance on “A Loose End” adds to a burgeoning co-production axis between two of the most prominent upscale production houses in Uruguay and Argentina, whose films regularly score festival berths and prizes at big or name festivals.
Cordón’s “El Hombre Nuevo,” directed by Aldo Garay, scored a Berlinale LGBTQ Teddy Award for best documentary; Tarea Fina’s “Luz Incidente,” took the Fipresci best feature prize at the 2016 Mar del Plata Festival; “Natural Sciences” topped the Berlin Festival’s 2014 Competition Generation Kplus.
One of the most familiar faces of the New Argentine Cinema, Hendler also starred in 2001’s “25 Watts,” which brought down the flag on a more internationally ambitious cinema in Uruguay.
