Loza (Tiger winner in 2003 with Extraño) made this portrait, with his young colleague Iván Fund, of three women who try to provide health care in a tropical corner of Argentina plagued by dengue fever and poverty. Fiction with beautiful documentary elements. Or vice versa.
Three women at an Argentine bus station. They don’t know each other, but take a night bus to a deserted hospital in the tropical north of the country. This will be their base to offer health care; Coca, Luchi and Noe visit inhabitants of remote villages who are plagued by poverty, hunger and dengue fever.
We see a mother with six kids, an unemployed man looking for two small children, a 78-year-old man suffering malnutrition and a teenage girl who is pregnant for the second time - probably by her father.
The patients are ‘played’ by people from the local population. Integrating documentary elements in a fiction film has been used in several recent Argentine films; Santiago Loza (Tiger Award winner in 2003 with Extraño) and Iván Fund use it most emphatically use in this dignified, very human drama. When Coca, Luchi and Noe do each other’s hair and lipstick in hospital, it’s obviously set up. It forms a shrill and sad contrast with the harsh reality they meet on their missions of care.
Short Profile of Santiago Loza (& Iván Fund) by Barbara Litvine, student MA Film Curating at the London Consortium:
Argentinean filmmakers Santiago Loza and Iván Fund co-directed Los labios (The Lips, 2010).
Fund was born in 1984 and The Lips is his sixth film. He was until recently studying with co-director Loza, who has been very involved in the promotion of young Argentinean filmmakers. 'They have a particular vision, which is much more interesting than ours,' he says. 'They take more risks, in form and aesthetics. Co-directing Los labios allowed me to learn from Iván, and this fact was already an achievement.'
Loza was born in 1971 in Cordoba, Argentina. He graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in Film Studies, also studying theatre and literature. His first film, Extraño (Strange, 2003), won a Tiger Award. Since then, he has directed Cuatro mujeres descalzas (2005), Artico (2008), Rosa Patria (Pink Motherland, 2009) and La invention de la carne (The Invention of the Flesh, 2009), in which he explores a new aesthetic approach to the story of a woman who offers her body to medical students until one of them becomes obsessed with her and they start a relationship.
Loza claims to make his films in a dialectical way, with dialogue between each of them and with the new film refuting the old one. But, he says, 'even adopting this perspective, one keeps telling the same story'.
Making Los labios was a way of asking questions and for understanding poverty and happiness. 'I have no doubt I will keep making films,' he says. 'I live cinema as a form of cultural resistance.'