Director/Writer: Martín Sappia, Producers: Lorena Quevedo, Pablo Di Patrizio Production: Twins Latin Films, Argentina, Language: Spanish, 91′, 2020, Rights: World (Except LATAM)
Who is Jorge Bonino?
A documentary on the life and art of Jorge Bonino (b. 1935). A life marked by wandering. A character that leaves no traces or maps to trace. The file does not give an account of him. His works had no scripts and only existed in the fugacity of the moment. Jorge Bonino was an unclassifiable artist. He triumphed in all of Europe without a translator, he only used an invented language that everyone understood. An imaginary friend mapped the traces his body left in space through stories about a possible life.
About Jorge Bonino
He moved to the Cordoba capital in 1956. Received as an architect from the National University of Cordoba. His curious monologues and theatrical interventions capture the attention of Marilú Marini who discovers him in 1966 and takes him to the Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires where his director, Roberto Villanueva, offers him five performances that become months of great repercussion. His second work Asfixiones o enunciados premiered in the same area in 1968.
He moves to Spain and then to Paris where Antonio Seguí encourages him to appear at La Vieille Grille. Between 1970-74 he performed in Holland, Spain, Romania and Germany.
He returned to his homeland in 1975 and in 1976 participated in a short film directed by Marta Minujín and in the film Piedra Libre by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson.
Directors statement
I started with the question Who is Jorge Bonino? The first attempt hit the impossibility of knowing. With Bonino the idea of biography is disarticulated. I only found loose pieces, crumbs, and fragments of a past life, all sustained by the myth built around him. What is concrete is the emptiness and the lack of an archive. Bonino invented a language and that language invented a life, as difficult to unravel as the language that built it.
Directors Bio
Martín Sappia is a film director and editor. He has worked on more than thirty feature films for cinema, and about fifty documentaries for television. He has made pieces for museums and visual artists. He has taught documentary filmmaking at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and at the National University of Córdoba he teaches editing. As an editor, we can highlight Las cruces by Teresa Arredondo y Carlos Vásquez (2018), Las calles by María Aparicio (2015). “A body exploded into a thousand pieces” is his debut film.