THE GOLD BUG
(EL ESCARABAJO DE ORO)
Dir. Alejo Moguillansky, 2014
Argentina, 100 minutes
In Spanish with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 7 – 7:30 PM followed by remote Q+A with filmmaker Alejo Moguillansky
(This event is $10.)
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14 – 7:30 PM

Co-presented with Cinema Tropical.

They all struggle: European Filmmakers vs. South American Filmmakers; Independent Cinema vs. Cinema Funds; Wild vs. Civilisation; North vs. South; Pirates vs. Pirates; An old XIX Century Politician vs. an old XIX Century feminist Poet; Producers vs. Directors; Edgar Allen Poe vs. Robert Louis Stevenson; Long John Silver vs. Captain Smollet; Adventure vs. Money; Beauty vs. Greed; The search of truth and wisdom vs. hypocrisy and wickedness; The rich vs. the poor; Men vs. Women; Fiction vs. Facts. They all struggle, but only one wins.

Commissioned by a Danish film festival as a movie about 19th century feminist poet, Victoria Benidectssen, THE GOLD BUG instead became a literal and figurative adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure novel Treasure Island. Moguillansky, producer Mariano Llinas, and actors Walter Jakob and Rafael Spregelburd play themselves in the film as a group of Argentine actors who’ve chanced upon a 17th century treasure map leading to the northern Argentine province of Misiones. using the commission to make a film about Benedictsson as cover, the ensemble sets out to find the buried treasure while convincing the European producers and co-director that their real aim is to also make a biography about 19th-century Argentine political radical Leandro N. Alem, so as to avoid being neo-colonialist. Directly riffing off of the real world circumstances in which the movie itself came into being, THE GOLD BUG is a meta-textual questioning of the possibility of filmmaking in a capitalist, Euro-centric film ecosystem.