El futuro perfecto/The Future Perfect
Monday, March 18, 6:15 pm, UNC Charlotte Main Campus, Student Union Theater
Nele Wohlatz, Argentina, 2016/65 min.
Spanish and Mandarin with English subtitles
Sponsors: Pragda Grant, Spanish Club CEPA, Confucius Institute
Introduction by David Dalton, Assistant Professor of Spanish, UNC Charlotte. Discussion with members of the Confucius Institute will follow screening.
Awarded Best First Feature at the Locarno International Film Festival, German-Argentinian newcomer Nele Wolatz’s The Future Perfect explores fractured relationships within culture, tradition, and language in this whimsical romantic comedy.
Xiaobin is 17 years old and does not speak a single word of Spanish when she arrives in Argentina. But a few days later, she already has a new name, Beatriz, and a job in a Chinese supermarket. Her family lives in a parallel world in a launderette, far removed from the Argentinians. Xiaobin secretly saves money and enrolls at a language school. She tries out in the street what she learns there. After having learned how to “make appointments,” she arranges to meet a supermarket customer, Vijay. He comes from India, and although they can barely communicate with each other, they start a secret romance. And when she practices the condicional, the form of possibility, Xiaobin starts thinking about the future. What would happen if her parents learned about Vijay? The more she masters the Spanish language, the more she interferes in the scenario.
“Wohlatz offers a perceptive, empathetic, very tender picture of how it might feel to be an 18-year-old Chinese woman arriving in Buenos Aires and working to carve out a new independent life and identity.” – Jonathan Romney, Film Comment
