November 2025

Man Facing Southeast
1986, Argentina, dir. Eliseo Subiela, 105 mins



NOTES:

From "Soy Rantés, Soy el Dr. Denis: Hombre Mirando al Sudeste 30 Años Después":
Translated from Spanish

"I gave my style the name 'suspicious realism' because there is always the question of whether what we are seeing is real or not, and the limits of the reality that we know."

"All my films deal with insanity. I cannot act innocent. It is obvious in almost all of my films. It's a subject that emerges, at first, as a way of exorcising, of purging myself of my fear of insanity. I was really afraid of insanity, almost more than death. But I don't know. Either way I continue to be drawn by people who can't stand reality as it is, who can't live in a normal reality."

(On his 1961 Docufiction short about El Borda, same Hospital where Man Facing Southeast was filmed): "The whole process took 9 months and when I finished the film I told the authorities at the hospital that I wanted to show them the documentary and they said: 'What documentary' - ' The one I filmed here.' They had no idea. We had put up lights, rails, dollies. Imagine the level of negligence that there was."

"Man Facing was filmed in 5 or 6 weeks in the hospital, so we really got to know the patients, and well, it was a really intense human experience. From the smells—the smell of the hospital, which is a very particular smell that clings to your clothes. I talk about that too in Devoured Landscapes (2012). It’s true that it’s a mix of the exudation of medication and of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia has a smell. And well, a very, very intense experience.”