July 13, 2011 - 13:36 AMT
Golden Apricot to feature Diego Lerman's The Invisible Eye

Golden Apricot 8th international film festival will feature Argentinean director Diego Lerman's The Invisible Eye.

The movie is presented by scriptwriter Maria Meira, as the filmmaker himself was unable to make it to Yerevan.

As Ms. Meira noted, the script was written in 2007. “The film portrays totalitarian Argentina of 982, with an ever-present invisible eye inherent to all dictatorial regimes,” the scriptwriter said.

Set against the backdrop of Argentina’s military regime of the 1980s, Diego Lerman’s engrossing and beautifully acted exploration of the totalitarian urge opens with a portrait of Maria Teresa, a lonely and deeply repressed assistant teacher at an elite Buenos Aires private school. Obedient and willing, she accepts unquestioningly the school’s rigid code of conduct and proud identification with the nation state. But her head professor’s words about the “cancer of subversion” and need for total surveillance soon feed an unhealthy obsession with one of her students, leading to an ensuing spiral of degradation and breakdown in discipline that parallels a popular rebellion beyond the school’s ivy-covered walls.

The film was screened at Cannes Film Festival in 2010.