“A warm-hearted celebration of the bond between two women, but also of their relationship to Sanguinetti herself.”

Argentinian photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti makes a striking feature debut with The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer (La ilusión de un verano sin fin), unveiling in Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present competition. A continuation of the work that has been the focus of multiple monographs (including one that shares a title with this film), Sanguinetti’s film charts the lives of two cousins, Guillermina (Guille) and Belinda (Beli), over a period of more than 25 years. Beginning in 1999 when the girls are 9 years old, we become privy to the simple joys of their childhood in rural Argentina and the frank realities of life on a farm raising livestock, following them into adulthood as they pursue work on or off the farm and have their own families.

The film is not an overarching sociological portrait of rural living, but rather a tender examination of how these two women evolve from childhood and beyond. When we meet them as children, Guille and Beli love playing together and hamming it up for the camera, singing their favorite songs, play-acting a marriage and a funeral, and imagining faraway travels. Both girls have the typical dreams of children their age: make friends, find glamorous jobs as adults, and marry a nice husband and have children. As they grow older, Guille remains more outgoing and Beli becomes more reserved; the former finds contentment as a schoolteacher while the latter remains on the farm with her gaucho husband and their children. But even as familial duties (both girls become mothers before the age of twenty) and physical distance lead to periods of estrangement and little communication, the sister-like bond between them remains unbroken, as demonstrated in the charming final section of the film when Guille and Beli accompany Sanguinetti on a trip to Paris. Visiting iconic landmarks, attending the opening of a gallery show focused on the photos that Sanguinetti has taken of them since childhood, and dressing in designer clothes and posing for a photo shoot, Guille and Beli rediscover the playful nature of their childhood bond. It is a joy to watch them embrace this once-in-a-lifetime experience and reaffirm the closeness between them.

While The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer may have a rigidly defined narrative focus, Sanguinetti makes several artistic choices that create more than a simple collection of archival footage. The passage of time, even more than seeing Guille and Beli age, is baked into the visual aesthetic of the film. Up until the girls enter their early twenties, the film maintains the look of ’90s and early 2000s era camcorder footage, giving these scenes a retro charm. As it shifts towards the cleanness of modern digital cameras, this starkness is reflected in the film’s tone, and the reality of their adult lives in comparison to their childhood dreams reveals the limitations that are inherent in this milieu. Occasional visual flourishes, such as slo-mo and night footage shot on grainy film, give the cinematography a slightly unreal quality reflected in the fantastical daydreams of Guille and Beli’s childhood. And Sanguinetti makes the bold decision to elide much of the girls’ twenties, with a passage of ten years marked by brief moments of Guille’s daughter as she ages from a newborn to being the same age as her mother was when this project began. While it might have been worthwhile to see more of how Guille and Beli’s lives changed during this decade, the time jump does make the final section centered around their renewed bond all the more graceful and satisfying. And Sanguinetti successfully incorporates her primary artistic practice into the film, as her photographs of the two girls are interspersed throughout the film and demonstrate her affection for them and the environment in which they live.

The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer is a warm-hearted celebration of the bond between two women, but also of their relationship to Sanguinetti herself. She involves Guille and Beli in her artistic process, posing them as needed and encouraging Guille to give titles to the photos that reflect her emotions in those moments. In making the subjects a part of her artistic creation and letting her presence be integrated into the film (the camera can be heard clicking away, and she and her subjects frequently address each other), Sanguinetti refuses an objective, distanced portrait of a generation and a milieu. Rather, she has crafted a charming yet clear-eyed documentation of two women and their inseparable bond to each other and their culture, preserved through an artistic collaboration that is imprinted by their singular personalities.

(c) Image copyright – Alessandra Sanguinetti