“The dust”, an unconventional document | Written and directed by Nicolás Torchinsky

Dust – 7 points

(Argentina, 2023)

Direction and script: Nicolás Torchinsky.

Duration: 73 minutes.

Premiering exclusively at Cine Arte Cacodelphia, on Saturdays at 7 p.m.

Objects, fingers that manipulate them, sounds, voices, photographs, reflections. Millions of miles away from the conventional hagiographic documentary, Nicolás Torchinsky’s new feature film builds the profile of a figure from the fragments of her existence, recorded in memory and in the materiality that surrounded her in life. As if it were an indirect evocation, in which the silhouette to be outlined is put together little by little and patiently, the director of The nostalgia of the centaur reconstructs the life and work of her aunt July Regina Romero, trans woman, actress, who died in 2016. Some time after his death, the apartment he occupied for much of his life – after returning from a brazilian exile in the 80s during which, they say, shared prison with Lula da Silva – It must be emptied and dismantled, reduced to an immobile, generic, anonymous skeleton.

Torchinsky records this process with a particular sidelong glance, without filming the subjects’ faces, but their hands and other parts of their bodies. But, above all, it records the voices. Those of the living and the others, recorded by fire on cassettes still inserted in the answering machine. Some are even allowed moments of fictionrecreations and/or (re)inventions that, however, are nothing more than processes to try to achieve a certain deep truth. July was an artist and participated in the underground scene when the Gender Identity Law It could only be a fantasy, and some fragments of an old VHS recording allow it to be seen in action in an adaptation of a work by Copy. In the present tense someone makes an effort to recover and remake a dream dreamed the previous night, in which she was once again him, Julio, but very young and “very homosexual.” His sister can’t stop calling him by his birth name, a logical consequence after so many years of seeing him in a masculine light.

The filmmaker talks with his father, and he disapproves of the idea of ​​filming the image of a window hit by raindrops. “What’s the point?” he says, almost angry. The dresses still hang in the closets. The refrigerator is detached, one by one, from the magnets with telephone numbers for pizzerias, delicatessens, laundromats and the medical emergency number. In a drawer there is an old cigarette case and letters from a Brazilian lover of July who, it is said, was the great love of his life. The theater, the queer world when that term was not yet common, the like with whom he lived for decades. All that and many more things –those other things that are an essential part of a life, but They do not usually appear in official biographies. are the base materials of The dusta title with a polysemic meaning whose spectral quality is not accidental.

Torchinsky is fully aware that the memory construction It is nothing more than a sum of ghostly echoes of the past reinventing themselves in the present. For that same reason the film, rather than an essayistic or experimental documentary about a flesh and blood being that has ceased to be flesh and blood, feels more like an elegiac tribute in audiovisual format. The record of a duel, of course, but also a memento mori poetic that celebrates the passage of an entire life, with its ups and downs, its happiness and pain.