A prominent Argentine filmmaker, Bemberg directed six feature films – including Camila, nominated in 1985 for the Oscar for best foreign language film – and two shorts. She wrote scripts for her own and other people’s films.
A tribute series will screen her filmography as a director and the feature film María Luisa Bemberg: The echo of my voiceby Alejandro Maci.
In addition, on Friday the 10th the María Luisa Bemberg Room (former Room B) will be inaugurated.
Diary
Friday 10th May
6 p.m.: Inauguration of the María Luisa Bemberg Room
6:30 p.m.: The world of women and Toys (short films)
7 p.m.: Talk with Alejandro Maci + María Luisa Bemberg: The echo of my voice
Saturday May 11
6 p.m.: Miss Mary
8 p.m.: Me, the worst of all
Friday, May 17
6 p.m.: Camila
8 p.m.: Moments
Saturday May 18
6 p.m.: That’s not talked about
8 p.m.: Nobody’s Lady
Friday, May 24
6 p.m.: Me, the worst of all
8 p.m.: Nobody’s Lady
Saturday May 25
6 p.m.: Camila
8 p.m.: Moments
Friday, May 31
6 p.m.: That’s not talked about
8 p.m.: Miss Mary
Saturday 1 June
6 p.m.: María Luisa Bemberg: The echo of my voice + talk with Alejandro Maci
8 p.m.: The world of women and Toys (short films) + talk with María del Carmen Vieites Mato, Ana María Muchnik and Marcela Visconti
Screenings do not require ticket reservations: admission is on a first-come, first-served basis until the room’s capacity is exhausted. Once the function has started, entry to the room will not be permitted.
Programming
The world of women
María Luisa Bemberg. Argentina, 1972. 16′. Documentary short film.
Short film about a trade fair for products aimed at women. With a sarcastic and corrosive gaze—both toward the men who build this “world” (workers, businessmen) and toward the women who support them—and through distancing resources that rest mainly on the conflict between image and sound, the artist creates a acute reflection on the degradation and social discrimination of women carried out through products that supposedly exalt and single them out.
Toys
María Luisa Bemberg. Argentina, 1978. 12′. Documentary film.
Based on interviews with girls and boys at the Rural Exhibition, at the end of the 1970s, this short film produces a shocking record of the construction of identities in our country at that time. Dolls, trains, kitchenettes, cars, housewives, astronauts. The limitations inherited from one generation to another, the games that each of these little ones want to play and the desires about the professions to follow are represented by something as simple as their toys.
Moments
María Luisa Bemberg. Argentina, 1981. 90′. Drama.
Lucía marries Sebastián at the age of twenty. She is intensely happy for a year, at the end of which he dies and she loses the child she was expecting. She later graduated as a landscape architect and remarried. Mauricio is a medical analyst, a serious, serious man, saddened by not being able to give her the child she longs for. He loves her deeply. Thus the years pass and Lucía’s wounds heal. She is surrounded by the serenity of her husband, she becomes emotionally drowsy. One day she meets Nicolás for professional reasons. This seductive and vital boy is an executive, married with two daughters. Upon discovering Lucía, Nicolás falls in love with her almost without knowing her. She, little by little, allows herself to be infected by a fervor that reminds her of others that she thought were forgotten. With premeditation, she throws herself into this adventure as a last attempt to revive, once again, the passion of her twenty-year-old self.
nobody’s lady
María Luisa Bemberg. Argentina, 1982. 90′. Drama.
It is the story of Leonor, a good housewife who lives with her husband, Fernando, and their two children. She loves her husband deeply and does not question the reciprocity of her love and her fidelity. One day, circumstantially, she discovers that her husband is cheating on her. Leonor feels emotionally betrayed and understands that her world, based on a lie, has collapsed like a house of cards.
Camila
María Luisa Bemberg. Argentina, 1984. 107′. Drama. For people over 16 years old.
A film based on real events that tells the love story between the aristocrat Camila O’Gorman and the priest Ladislao Gutiérrez in the 19th century. A relationship that caused scandal between the church and society of the time.
Miss Mary
María Luisa Bemberg. Argentina, 1986. 100′. Drama. For ages 13 and up.
The action takes place in an Argentine ranch, beginning in the summer of 1938. It is the story of a family, a symbol of the oligarchy, who hires Miss Mary to firmly guide the education of the three young people in the house. And just as social movements are going to burst onto the political scene of a country in crisis, the presence of Miss Mary is going to provoke within that family, unintentionally, the sudden emergence of truth, rupture and disorder.
I, the worst of all
María Luisa Bemberg. Argentina, 1990. 107′. Drama. For ages 13 and up.
Work inspired by the essay The Traps of Faith, by Octavio Paz. It narrates the last years of the famous and beautiful Juana Inés de la Cruz (known in Mexico as the Tenth Muse), who at the age of twenty entered a convent to study. The Spanish Crown and the Church, two powers that sometimes clashed, determined Sor Juana’s life. In colonial Mexico, the viceroys protected her, but the Church censured her for teaching singing to her students and for dedicating herself to astronomy, poetry, theater, philosophy and theology. Sor Juana would pay dearly for her poetic fervor and even more so for her theological daring. When Mexico becomes independent, she loses the protection of the Crown and is left alone in front of her confessor, a member of the Inquisition, and the archbishop of Mexico, a fanatical misogynist. The bishop of Puebla also sets a trap for her, into which Sor Juana falls with the naivety of the innocent.
That is not talked about
María Luisa Bemberg. Argentina, 1993. 103′. Drama. For people over 16 years old.
Leonor, a rich widow, is very proud of her only thirteen-year-old daughter. There’s only one problem: the girl is a dwarf. Leonor, a true authority, has managed to stop people from talking about her daughter’s problem. And, curiously, a rich bachelor, for whom the ladies yearned, falls in love with the girl.
María Luisa Bemberg: The echo of my voice
Alejandro Maci. Argentina, 2021. 90′. Documentary film.
María Luisa Bemberg was born in the 1920s, into one of the most powerful families in the country. Her education did everything possible to make her a beautiful, devoted and – above all – silent wife. She began directing at almost the age of 60 and toured festivals, won awards and received an Oscar nomination. Alejandro Maci worked with Bemberg for a decade and recorded with her, days before her death, a series of conversations that reveal her view on cinema and her arduous path. This documentary follows in her footsteps.
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