Historias breves


Historias breves is an Argentine feature-length film made up of nine short films directed, respectively, by Daniel Burman, Adrián Caetano, Jorge Gaggero, Tristán Gicovate, Andrés Tambornino and Ulises Rosell, Sandra Gugliotta, Lucrecia Martel, Pablo Ramos, and Bruno Stagnaro. It debuted in theaters on May 19, 1995.

The film brings together the winners of the first edition of the Argentine National Film Board's annual public script competition, the grand prize of which is the budget to produce a short film. Eventually screened in national theaters, the omnibus film gave rise and recognition to a new generation of Argentine filmmakers known collectively as the New Argentine Cinema—a wave of contemporary filmmaking that began in the mid-1990s in reaction to decades of political and economic crises in the country.

Background

Filmmaker Lucrecia Martel explained in a 2008 interview that the premiere of the compilation film was “unprecedented” in Argentina and came about after all the directors of the short films banded together and visited the Argentine National Film Board headquarters in Buenos Aires repeatedly to ask the script contest organizers to premiere all the short films as a string of films in a theater. The filmmakers waited for hours until the contest organizers would meet with them and argued that it was a waste of state funding if they didn't exhibit the finished films. As a result, the films were exhibited on the dedicated screens of the national public circuit run by INCAA.

Critical reception

Film critic Claudio España of La Nación wrote:
Clarín wrote:
Film scholars Raúl Manrupe and María Alejandra Portela wrote:
El Amante del Cine magazine wrote:

Legacy

Filmmaker Lucrecia Martel says that the premiere of Historias breves was "very successful" and drew 10,000 viewers. "It also inspired people," she says, "to study filmmaking and to start making shorts. It was a really important phenomenon in spiritual terms. Curiously, many of the directors who began their careers at the time—’95 or ’96—are still making films today. That event inaugurated the activity of a lot of directors, and also a lot of young people’s interest in film." Film scholar Haden Guest says it helped inaugurate the New Argentine Cinema and “is really where the began.”