The Dead Man and Being Happy, The

While shooting a documentary about terminally ill patients, Javier Rebollo met a man describing himself as a “tumour factory” who became the inspiration for the director’s third feature film: as an elderly, hired assassin, Santos knows that all roads lead to the hereafter. This time, lying in a room on the top floor of a hospital in Buenos Aires, he realises he’ll be heading that way as well pretty soon: he’s 75 and has three tumours. But despite his pain and waning strength, he is talked into accepting another job. Instead of carrying it out, however, he decides to do a runner; he doses himself up with morphine and sets off on a trip across Argentina, heading nowhere in particular. Taking a simple plotline, the unclassifiable film director develops his road movie as a modern chivalric romance and as an experiment in which he makes consistent use of voice-over (provided by the film’s scriptwriter Lola Mayo, whom Rebollo describes as his spiritual twin), however, the narrative gradually opens out into a multi-layered tale about the origin of myths. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)