Invasión

Director: Hugo Santiago

1969 / 123min / DCP

Jorge Luis Borges’s dreamlike first venture into cinema, with a screenplay co-written by Borges, fellow author and sometimes collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, and director Santiago, a former assistant to Robert Bresson, here making his feature directorial debut. The resulting film is a shape-shifting reworking of The Illiad that’s set in the besieged city of Aquiléa—in fact, Buenos Aires—where the only hope for resistance is offered by a volunteer troop of middle-aged men summoned by an elderly leader, a group who spend their time poring over maps, holding endless meetings, and using those meetings to debate strategies ad nauseum. Part-policier, part-political thriller; of it Borges wrote “a film is the detailed projection both seen and heard, enriched and magical, of something dreamed and barely glimpsed… Invasión seems unlike any other film that I have seen, and may well be the first example of a whole new fantastic genre."