24/09/2024 - The film by Argentina's Iair Said is a tragicomedy as minimal as it is everyday. Starring the director himself, with subtle humour it tackles heavy issues such as euthanasia, ageing and loneliness

Antonia Zegers, Juliana Gattas, Rita Cortese and Iair Said in Most People Die on Sundays

Most People Die on Sundays, the new feature film (after the short film Presente imperfecto, which competed at Cannes in 2015, and the non-fiction film Flora no es un canto a la vida) by the director, actor and screenwriter from Buenos Aires, Iair Said, was the winner of the WIP Latam award at last year’s San Sebastian International Film Festival. It is now being screened in the Horizontes Latinos section of the Basque film festival after having premiered in the ACID programme at the last Cannes Film Festival.

Starring Iair himself, the film is also played with naturalness and grace by Rita Cortese (whom we saw a year ago at this same festival in Blondi [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dolores Fonzi
film profile], with which it shares a certain independent, familiar and intimate feel in Most People Die on Sundays), Antonia Zegers (this year also in The Exiles [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]) and Juliana Gattas. And it portrays how a young, middle-class, overweight Jewish gay man, recently abandoned by his partner, returns from Europe due to the death of his uncle. At home, he also learns that his mother has decided to disconnect his father's respirator, which has been keeping him alive for years.

The perplexed central character is then brought face to face with the - what he thought was a distant - familiar reality and its peculiarities: a microcosm dominated by women and Jewish culture, with its - to an outsider's eyes - grotesque, ceremonial and old-fashioned rituals. With an engrossed look at almost everything that happens before his big, bright eyes and trying to weather the small storms that rage over his head with the best of humour, Iair uses tragicomedy to take the edge off intense subjects that he tackles with a close-up camera that does not disguise the ugliness or the deterioration of a life as nondescript as ours could be.

And the fact that the protagonist shamelessly sports a non-normative physique, that his irrepressible sexual impulses hold him tightly to life in moments of anxiety or that he portrays how after a funeral he feels like gorging himself on junk food add empathy, comedy (subtle, clumsy and unique, with no big gags, appealing more to the smile than to the laughter) and sympathy to a film that tells a minimal story around which great existential themes quietly orbit. Among them, absence, tenderness, bonds, fear of death, ageing and loneliness, and how each person manages grief differently. Because, as the filmmaker says in this film that has so much of himself, laughing and crying can go hand in hand.

Most People Die on Sundays is produced by the Argentinean companies Campo Cine and Patagonik, the Italian company dispàrte, the Swiss company My Gosh and the Spanish company Nephillim Producciones (Spain). Its international sales are managed by the Greek agency Heretic.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)