- Golden Globe Awards
About A Woman (Argentina)
A murder mystery set in 1955 Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the administration of President Peron, when different political forces were trying to overthrow his government. Mariano Turek and Lujan Loioco’s About a Woman (Algo con una mujer) is a whodunit in which the detective is curiously a housewife, Rosa, played by Maria Soldi, a skillful seamstress who becomes the only witness of a murder.
The film was shot in Buenos Aires with a script penned by the two directors, cinematography by Gustavo Biazzi and editing by Nicolas Goldbart. It’s an adaptation of La Rosa, by Argentinian playwright Julio César Beltzer: in the middle of a plot filled with tension and enigmas the author puts a focus on the dilemmas of political militancy and the domestic repercussions of the social upheaval in Argentina in the mid-’50s, when dominant Peronism was violently dethroned giving way to an endless ideological dispute (the famous “grieta”) which still persist today.
“About a Woman is a crime story set in a pivotal year in the political and social history of our country, when the course of things would change forever,” co-director Turek says. “The film tells the story of Rosa, house-wife and seamstress, who spends most of the time in her house alone, since her aloof husband is more than often absent. The socioeconomic context explains the violent issues in Buenos Aires’ daily life. One night, by accident, Rosa, a mysterious character herself, unwittingly witnesses a crime, and being a rabid fan of radio theater and noir/detective novels, she becomes an investigator, a sort of a hard-boiled private eye in her own crime case.”
About a Woman represents the second feature-length film for co-director Turek and Loioco, a couple in real life, after La niña de tacones amarilloso (2016), and it’s dedicated to their newly born daughter. It also features actor Manuel Vignau in the role of Rosa’s husband Paulino, whose militancy pro-Peron, other than making him very surly, doesn’t leave him much time to spend with Rosa. The film debuted very successfully – and to rave reviews – last June in Argentina on the Cine.Ar TV network and is now available on its streaming platform.