Sidewalls

Gustavo Taretto's Sidewalls (Spanish: Medianeras) took nearly a decade to reach its final form. Taretto first made the material as a short of the same name in 2005, and it won prizes at more than forty festivals around the world. The feature version premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011 and then travelled widely, to Sundance, Karlovy Vary and São Paulo among others.

Pilar López de Ayala, the Spanish actress best known for Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica, leads the cast with the Argentine actor Javier Drolas, and Inés Efron and Rafael Ferro take the supporting roles. Leandro Martínez shot it and Pablo Mari edited it, both regular collaborators of Taretto's. Gabriel Chwojnik's score uses Erik Satie's Gnossienne No. 1 as a recurring motif.

What interests Taretto most is the visual chaos of a city built up of medianeras, the bare side walls of buildings that face onto alleys, and that subject took on a life of its own in Argentine writing on architecture and urban studies through the 2010s. The city's planning authorities later brought the film into cultural-heritage discussions of the residential streetscape of Buenos Aires. As a debut feature, it is still the film Taretto is best known for; he has worked mainly in television since.