Kamchatka 2003

“A festival favourite everywhere it plays, Marcelo Piñeyro’s marvelously human film is a touching and potent evocation of Argentina in 1976, immediately after the brutal coup d’état, when thousands of Argentineans ‘disappeared’ for speaking out against the new regime. Though focusing on the plight of a single family – a lawyer, his teacher wife and their two kids, forced to leave their city home for a country hideaway – this Oscar-nominated film becomes a sensitive universal statement about loss and love… Piñeyro beautifully layers themes and metaphors to examine the parents’ politically charged fear through the lens of childish priorities and punishment… Family bonds are reinforced by games of Risk, in which Kamchatka is the last stronghold of the beleaguered, the best place to be, [ten-year-old] Harry says, when you want to resist assault. The film’s nostalgic lyricism makes a political statement that is as delicate as it is lucid, a delightful study of the legacy of tender affection these parents give their sons.” — Vancouver International Film Festival