“Morpho Azul”: a short film from the Pampas that dazzles with its poetic and disturbing universe

The short film “Morpho Azul”directed by Belkis Martin and winner of Short Stories Award 2022continues its journey through festivals and cultural spaces after also having been part of the Pampean productions selected in the latest edition of the General Pico International Film Festival.

Filmed entirely in Santa Rosa, La Pampawith the support of National Endowment for the Arts and the Secretary of Culture of the Provincethe film—14 minutes long—combines fiction and drama in a story that delves into the sensitivity of Vickyperformed by Victoria Rostoma young woman who collects insects, plants, hair and minimal objects with a meticulous and disturbing fascination. His gaze, assisted by magnifying glasses and tweezers, attempts to grasp the essence of what he touches, expanding the symbolic power of the subtle.

One day, the blue iridescence of a butterfly appears before his eyes in the field, and from that moment his life is involved in the obsessive search for that sparkle, perhaps real.

His world, inhabited by stillness and mystery, becomes the scene of a tension between life and death, beauty and the disturbing.

The cast is completed with Turi Fazziniand the Pampas technical team includes Nico “Niño” Giorgis (production manager), Silvana Staudinger (assistant director), Pablo Huerta (photography direction), Ciro Rossetti (sound), Mary Magdalene Ten (art direction), Maribel Sanchez (makeup) and Nicholas Onischuk next to Belkis Martin (mounting). Also participating were the Provincial Museum of Natural History and the UNLPam Multidisciplinary Arthropod Studies Groupproviding scientific knowledge and collection material.

The film builds a hypnotic atmosphere where naturalistic aesthetics merge with the symbolic. The blue butterfly—delicate and enigmatic—becomes the center of a story about obsession, curiosity, and the limits of perception.

The writer and critic Juan Manuel Diazdoctor in Literature, acutely described the experience provoked by the short film: “The Pampa—not even on moonless country nights—had produced on my skin the sensation of terrifying discomfort that Morpho Azulthrough stuffed insects, armadillo shells, bird skeletons and the silent drama of its two protagonists, has been able to provoke. (…) In every corner, in every image and look, there is always something else: that I don’t know what that prevents us from relaxing, that terror that we ignore out of sanity, but that we cannot stop feeling once the door has been opened.”

With a refined visual language and a contained narrative, “Morpho Azul” transcends the story of a curious young woman and her taxidermist mentor to reveal a universe where contemplation becomes restlessness and where the microscopic expands until it becomes poetic.