Cuatreros, Albertina Carri, Argentina, 2016, 83’
Inspired in the first book written by her father, sociologist Roberto Carri, filmmaker Albertina Carri follows the trail of Isidro Velázquez, the last cattle thief in Argentina, accused of stealing livestock and shot down by the police in 1967. The result is a monumental documentary film, pure cinematographic construction, which gallops across history – the history of Argentina as well as personal history – in the first person. “I go in search of the trail of Isidro Velazquez, Argentina’s last rebellious gaucho. Since the search for lost time always is an erratic undertaking, am I really following the trail of this bourgeois fugitive? Or am I really after my own trail, my own heritage? I go to Chaco, to Cuba, I look for a lost film, I look in film archives for moving bodies that might return to me something of what left us too soon. What am I really after? I look for films. I also look for a family, a family where everyone is alive, a family where everyone is dead. I look for a revolution, bodies, some semblance of justice; I look for my mother, my father, both of whom “disappeared”, their remains, their names, what they left in me. I make a western with my own life. I look for a voice, my own, through the sound and fury left by those lives torn away by that bourgeois justice”.
Inspired in the first book written by her father, sociologist Roberto Carri, filmmaker Albertina Carri follows the trail of Isidro Velázquez, the last cattle thief in Argentina, accused of stealing livestock and shot down by the police in 1967.