About the film

La Flor is the latest gargantuan work from Mariano Llinás, and in its 808 staggering minutes the Argentinian director cross-sections, dismantles and denudes the filmmaking process.

Shot sequentially over the course of a decade, La Flor was filmed in no less than six countries and seven languages, and captured on everything from MiniDV camcorder to camera obscura.

The film is divided into six parts—as explained by Llinás from a picnic table in his disarmingly frank introduction—and only one of them has a beginning, middle, and end. Each episode stars the same four actors (Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa and Laura Paredes) in constantly shifting roles. The episodes veer wildly from B horror movie, musical, spy thriller, and on to more indefinable places the director brushes off as "too difficult to describe." The lone "complete" section is a remake of 1938’s A Day in the Country, Jean Renoir’s famously unfinished film.

All of which is to say there’s no containing La Flor. For 13 hours we’re left to watch, bleary-eyed and mouth agape, as it buckles under its own weight, bounces between filmic eras and storytelling modes, and trails off blissfully into tale within micro-tale. —Evan Bower

About the Filmmaker

Mariano Llinás was born in 1975 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a writer and producer, known for Historias extraordinarias (2008), La flor, and Paulina (2015).