In the Argentine Pampas, cousins Guillermina and Belinda cannot wait to grow up. When they are not swimming in the river and dancing through the long, breezy afternoons, they re-enact funeral ceremonies and feign surgery on dead animals. This quotidian desire to accelerate the inevitable passing of time animates photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti’s debut feature, “The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer.”
Presented in world premiere in Filmmakers of the Present at the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, the film was produced by distinguished director-producer Julia Solomonoff (“Nobody’s Watching”), with financing from Mubi and Impact Partners.
Sanguinetti’s gaze follows Guille and Belinda while they grow up, fall in love, raise children and slowly drift toward separate lives over two and a half decades. The seemingly home-footage structure forms a familiar and intimate setting, in which the grainy footage narrates the life passing between the moments Sanguinetti captured as part of her extensive, decades-long photography of close cousins Guille and Belinda.
“We’re just like extended family now,” says the director about her relationship with the duo, spanning over 25 years. “It was really organic. I did not want to make a project about two women growing up. I just knew them and wanted to be with them.”
