ITALPARK 6 points
(Argentina, 2024)
Direction and script: Juan Carlos Dominguez.
Duration: 82 minutes.
Premiere exclusively at the Recoleta Cultural Center and York Cinema (Olivos).
“When you want to have real fun / When you want to enjoy with excitement / Come here, to Italpark, to Italpark, to Italpaaaaaark.” The famous advertising jingle for the Buenos Aires amusement park was launched in the 80s, when the main attractions of the place were the shiny Corkscrew roller coaster and the Matter Horn spinning game, plus the also modern Samba. But this venture founded by three brothers of Italian origin, the Zanons, had already been in existence for more than two decades, spanning the lives of several generations of children, young people and adults, and pointing towards the future. A future cut short just a few years later, in the mid-1990s, when A technical fault in the Matter Horn ended the life of a fifteen-year-old girl. The last nail in the coffin of an icon of Buenos Aires that, they say, was no longer what it used to be. Those thirty years of permanence in the history of the city and in the memory of thousands and thousands of visitors is what counts. Italpark, the documentary by Juan Carlos Domínguez premiered a couple of months ago at the Bafici.
With a conventional structure, guided by the talking heads of the interviewees and archival images from newsreels, films and home records, the film nevertheless manages to touch the fibers of every viewer who has walked the 4,500 square meters that Thays Park today occupies. . Domínguez draws on the memories of former workers, fans, collectors and simple visitors to the Italpark to reconstruct a story that begins in 1960, when the celebrations of the sesquicentennial of the May Revolution were the excuse for the Zanons to present a handful of mechanical games, there close to the intersection of Avenida del Libertador and Callao. The chronological review of the rise, heyday, decline and death of the park is intertwined with the description of some of its most unforgettable rides, such as the Super 8 Volante roller coaster (the “old one”, as it used to be called), the horror ride known as The Ghost Grottoes, the Super Monza bumper cars or the Astroliner X-10 space simulator.
While period images, whether in Super-8 or video, proudly display a ride on the cable car or record the first ride of a little girl on the Dumbo aerial carousel, in the present the vestiges of the games are sought and pampered by collectors, ghosts that evoke the magic and fantasy of the past. The one of Italpark, the film, is a journey down the paths of memory, endearing to anyone who has visited the place during their childhood. The last scene, moving to the point of tears, accompanies a former worker as he walks on the grass of the current tree-lined park and describes the sensation of hearing the noise of the attractions of yesteryear, sound spectrums of a place and a time that it is almost impossible not to idealize.
