06/02/2025 - Albertina Carri’s film about a lesbian porn director who sets off on a road trip with her actors possesses plenty of spirit, but its aimlessness and odd pacing choices drag it down

Rocío Zuviría (left) and Carolina Alamino in White Roses, Fall!

Buenos Aires-born writer-director Albertina Carri returns to IFFR with her newest film, White Roses, Fall! [+see also:
trailer
film profile], for which she reunites with several members of the same cast from her 2018 feature, The Daughters of Fire. Having just world-premiered in the Dutch festival's Big Screen Competition, White Roses, Fall! is a clear thematic follow-up to her previous feature, which is similarly a lesbian road movie with polyamorous tendencies. It's a film that is sure to find an audience at Rotterdam, but in light of its overly casual pacing and several confusing narrative choices, its cultish charm is likely not to land far beyond these demographics.

Frustrated with creative constraints, amateur lesbian porn director Violeta (Carolina Alamino) – aka Viole – sets off from Buenos Aires on a road trip with her actors-cum-friends-cum-lovers (Rocío Zuviría as Carmen, Mijal Katzowicz as Agustina and Maru Marcet as Rosario) to make a new film, hoping that inspiration (and places to stay) will arise along the way. However, the group encounters several obstacles that slow them down, just as they begin meeting even more sapphic women on their travels – including an attractive mechanic and her partner – who know of Viole’s work and want to join in with the fun. Despite Carri’s rambling approach, she doesn’t take the same liberties on the visual side, which makes the work feel slower than anticipated.

The group doesn’t seem to have any objective or direction, but the journey itself is just as vague, leading one to wonder just what we might be gaining from experiencing the trip. The film is filled with metatextual running jokes: men repeatedly fail to make any significant appearance on screen, while Carri milks the classic sapphic-community gag that the women on the trip have all been romantically involved in some way. Viole repeatedly flips through recorded footage of the ocean on her camcorder, as if looking for something that will keep her going on the trip.

The movie’s unexpected tonal shift during the final quarter – lasting a full half an hour – cements White Roses, Fall! as a well-intentioned but oddball piece: aimless and sometimes humorous, with blows aimed at the systemic structures that plague us failing to land. In this much slower portion, Carri looks to throw punches at the systemic structures underlying our heteropatriarchal reality – narrated by a vampiric Pachamama-esque figure who drops buzzwords related to coloniality and ecohumanism – leading things to become decidedly more serious while stylistically more reminiscent of a video or performance-art piece. However, it feels as if it could be a different film altogether, ultimately leaving the viewer stranded by its closing images.

White Roses, Fall! is a production by Argentina’s Gentil Cine, Brazil’s Punta Colorada de Cinema and Spain’s Doxa Producciones. Its international sales are entrusted to Split Screen.