With a length of 868 minutes including breaks, it is the longest film in the history of Argentine cinema.

Divided into four parts, La Flor is an event film whose ideas and pleasures are ostensibly revealed while you watch. In “Episode I,” we get a tale of the supernatural that’s seemingly about the pleasure of waiting for something to happen. “Episode 2” is less straight-forward, thanks to its momentum-crushing reliance on banal flashbacks and scads of expository dialogue: a group of frustrated musicians, who are struggling to collaborate on a project, explain (at length) why that project isn’t quite coming together, until all their talking finally paves the way for a transformative musical performance. La Flor is more about performance and collaboration than narrative utility. La Flor starts to become more overtly about what it’s about—improvisation and exploration for its own sake—in “Episode 3,” a hideously distended spy thriller that’s divided into three interminable parts. The fourth is an abyss of cinema. The fifth revisits an old French film. The sixth speaks of captive women in the 19th century. These six episodes, these six genres have one thing in common: their four actresses. It is the actresses who advance the story, it is they too that as and when the film reveals. At the end of the story, at the end of the film, all these images will eventually draw up their four portraits.

Awards

This film was nominated and awarded in the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Locarno International Film Festival, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema.

About the director

Mario Llinas was born in 1975, Argentina, Buenos Aires. He says: „I like to spend whole days inside the cinema, sharing the experience with a lot of strangers that in the end become friends, or enemies, or potential loves.“