Cities in Lucía Puenzo’s Films

Fiction writer, scriptwriter, producer, and filmmaker Lucía Puenzo was born in 1976 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She grew up in a family of well-renowned artists, including her father, filmmaker Luis Puenzo (b. 1946). Her novels, film scripts, and short and feature films have continued to solidify steadily her prominence at home and abroad since the early 2000s. Most of Puenzo’s feature-length films stem from either her own or her contemporaries’ fictional writing. Her treatment of urban spaces across different genres – novels, films, short films, and television series – remains uniquely complex. Two cities in particular, Buenos Aires and Bariloche, recur in Puenzo’s work not solely as key settings for her fiction or film plots but also as ways of delineating intricate contours of political, social, and cultural importance.

Puenzo’s thematic and aesthetic focus on Buenos Aires and Bariloche sets her work apart from films made in the 1970s and 1980s. Filmmakers such as Héctor Olivera (b....