Hugo Santiago

Correspondencia Llinás-Piñeiro

During the quarantine in 2020, the two friends Mariano Llinás and Matías Piñeiro sent each other video letters – 8 in total, 4 each of them – to create a compilation of ideas, thoughts and exchanges commissioned by Sergi Álvarez Riosalido for La Casa Encendida (Madrid). Llinás is in Argentina and Piñeiro is in New York, and they begin to order each other portraits of places, reflections on artists, ideas on cinema.

Commentary on Les Autres

In 1973 Hugo Santiago made Les Autres, his second feature film. The film was produced in Paris by a team composed mostly of Argentines, and written together with Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Even so, the film ends up representing France in the official competition at the Cannes festival in 1974. That premiere is a great scandal in which political reasons and film criticism are confused. In this brief introduction, Hugo gives us some clues to better understand his most unknown work, and suggests that after the controversy unleashed in Cannes his career changed forever.

Santiago's Theorem

In 1969 Argentine filmmaker Hugo Santiago directed Invasión, his opera prima, written by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and later settled in France. This film documents his return to Buenos Aires in 2013 to shoot his latest film, Le ciel du centaure.


The Gold Bug

Feminism, Victoria Benedictsson, Leandro N. Alem, the Radical Party in Argentina, suicide, stunts, Edgar Allan Poe, the complicated relationship between low-budget films with a political aim and the film industry, Robert Louis Stevenson, fiction, facts, greed, gold treasures left by the Jesuits in Argentina, the 19th Century vs. the contemporary and the search for truth and wisdom are the background for this portrait of a clash between a Swedish artist and an Argentine film director.

Three Crowns of the Sailor

Shortly after murdering his professor, a young man encounters a sailor who offers him a position on his ship in exchange for 3 Danish crowns and his attention as he recounts his life story.

Dog's Dialogue

A charming tale of murder, perversity and narrative echoes told through shots of barking dogs and a La jetée-like series of stills.

Catherine Deneuve by Chance, or, A Certain Blondeness

A documentary interview with the French actress while on the sets of films in production. Several of the directors for whom she has made films are also interviewed