Elisha Subiela

Coincidences of life, Eliseo Subiela has died on the day that the birth of Jesus is commemorated, who was a sublimated and dreamlike character in one of his films associated with magical realism. The protagonist of his most successful film, Man Looking Southeast (1986), also had messianic reminiscences, as he appeared in a psychiatric hospital claiming that he was an extraterrestrial, who had come to study the behavior of Earth’s inhabitants, and despite his claim so extravagant, he seemed like someone very thorough in his points of view.

Eliseo Subiela was born in Buenos Aires in 1944, and apparently the childhood that he had to live with his brother Héctor was presided over by a soulless atmosphere, by the fragile health and distant attitude of his father, and the migraines of his mother who asked that her house was always dark. It is likely that this later influenced his taste for the fantastic in the ordinary, a certain escapism in need of dreamlike images, and his fondness for setting stories in hospitals and soulless homes. “Art without risk doesn’t interest me,” he declared on occasion, when he was accused of hermetic and inaccessible. And it is that he, he assures, he preferred to ask questions, rather than give answers with his cinema.

At the age of 17, he filmed a short film, and his dedication to advertising, where he made numerous commercials, prepared him to make the leap into film directing. His debut in fiction did not come until 1981 with La conquista del paraíso , which already marked his style, but his consecration, which allowed him to live from cinema from then on, came 5 years later with Hombre mirando al sudeste . For it he was recognized as best new director at the San Sebastian Festival; a much later American film, K-Pax , was considered a non-confessed copy of Subiela’s film.

A decade continues with Subiela’s best works, Últimas imágenes del naufragio (1989) and Don’t die without telling me where you’re going (1995), where he respectively presents a metaphor for Argentina and a romantic declaration of love for cinema. At the same time, he created his own Film School in Buenos Aires, the Eliseo Subiela Professional School of Film and Audiovisual Arts, where he taught.

Then his works decay, trapped in a somewhat self-indulgent, sometimes supposedly provocative aestheticism and symbolism. But he kept working until the end, and left precisely one film, Final Cut , pending release.