In short: Straight to VHS (2021)

Original title: Directamente para video

In 1989 the SOV film “Acto de violencia en una joven periodista” or “Act of Violence in [sic] a Young Journalist” was (barely) released straight-to-video in Uruguay. Directed (and edited and written and so on) by Manuel Lamas, it has apparently become a bit of a cult fascination with some filmmakers and critics in Uruguay and Argentina.

One of them is the director of this documentary, Emilio Silva Torres. In the film, Torres first attempts to define the strange fascination a theoretically badly made movie can have for certain people, the way it can arrive at results peculiarly similar to elements in the movies of filmmakers much higher on the artistic totem pole by going about things all wrong. If a film like this hits you, there’s something mystical about it, really. If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right, and all that soul.

Of course, Torres attempts to find out how a strange film like the object of his obsession came into existence. How was it made? Why? And where does its strange attraction come from? With this, the film turns into something of a detective story. Most of the actors and former associates of Lamas Torres is able to find don’t want to talk about the film or its maker – and certainly not on camera. On the other hand, strange synchronicities occur that further the project. All of which shifts Torres’ interest from Lamas the filmmaker to Lamas as a person, from where on out the documentary starts to include moments of weird horror, dramatizing the dread that can come with the realization that art you really love can come from pretty horrible people.

It’s an interesting approach to what Torres is trying to do here, straining against the idea that factual truth can actually deepen your inside about why a piece of art moves you. The inclusion of fictional elements certainly puts the factual truthfulness of the less fanciful parts of the documentary at hand in question as well, if not the use of any object truth in cases like this as a whole.