Te Extrano (I Miss You) screening

Te Extraño
Director: Fabian Hofman
Argentina, 2010, 96 min., color
Spanish w/English subtitles


United States Premiere


Festival Screenings
Castro Theatre July 24 1:30 PM
CineArts (at Palo Alto Square) Aug. 02 6:15 PM
Roda Theatre (Berkeley Rep Theatre) Aug. 04 6:45 PM
Smith Rafael Film Center Aug. 08 6:30 PM


Synopsis

I Miss You is the story of Javier’s exile. Javier is an 15 year old Argentinean boy who leaves his home for Mexico City burdened with the tragedy of his missing brother, a premature separation from his family and the weight of collective guilt.
The story explores adolescence and the birth of individual identity with all its shadows and lights. The tenderness, perplexity and pain of growing up are mixed in a vision of the world which expands and contracts during the experience of exile.
Javier grows, discovers love, sex, his basic needs for affection, and his helplessness —but at the same time struggles to separate himself from his missing brother.
This is also the story of the struggle and impotence of a middle-class Jewish family torn between guilt, denial, and fear. In the background we see the Argentina of the beginnings of the dictatorship, its society, trying hard not to see what’s going on, to shelter itself from state terrorism, as well as the stark contrast of the Mexico of the 1970s.



The character’s conflict lies in having to live the fate of his missing brother, being an absurd fugitive, having to emigrate to a place of which he knows nothing more than the name. The one who should have gone to Mexico was Adrián, the one that should have run away to save his neck, the one who should have survived; he had a vision about what to do in the world, he was the one who knew how to change it. He was brave, he really put his life on the line. He is the one everyone misses, the one who has left an unbridgeable vacuum in his family’s life. Adrián, who used to chew his ¬ngernails, who had asthma, who made everyone laugh with his dark sense of humor. He had it in him to become the triumphant guerrilla commander that the people would love, he had charisma, he wasn’t me...