Luxbox Films has acquired the world sales rights to Mariano Llinás‘ epic five-and-a-half -hour documentary “Life of Jorge Luis Borges,” which will world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in the Open – Non-Fiction section.
The film forms a biography of Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges, working from an exhaustive review of the papers he left, the books he read, and the places he went to.
The film is also “an attempt to decipher a very peculiar life: someone who lived like a hidden, underground warrior, whose cause was literature, literature conceived as a kingdom and as a landscape,” according to a statement.
“If Cold War spies fought from their desks or from an uninhabited house to defend their half of the world, Borges strove from a library to elevate and broaden the territories of his own tribe: the people for whom the most important part of the universe is books, plots and words.”
Llinás is perhaps best known for 2018’s “La Flor,” which, ruling out experimental projects or mere cinematic exercises, is the longest film in the history of cinema. Before that, “Balnearios” (2002) and “Historias Extraordinarias” (2008) both had significant festival play.
In 2003, he founded with Alejo Moguillansky, Agustín Mendilaharzu and Laura Citarella the group El Pampero Cine.
The producers on “Life of Jorge Luis Borges” are Citarella, Ezequiel Pierr, Mendilaharzu, Moguillanksy and Llinás for El Pampero Cine.
Llinás is the screenwriter. The DP is Mendilaharzu. The production designer is Ezequiel Pierri, and the editor is Ignacio Codino. Music is by Gabriel Chwojnik.
The protagonists include Ernesto Montequín, Nicolás Helft, Laura Paredes, Milva Leonardi and Pablo Dacal.