Film: Hacer Patria (Forging a Nation)
Studio: Distribution Company Argentina
Director: David Blaustein
Screening Date: May 19, 2008 Toronto Hispano-American Film Festival www.thaff.com
Film Length: 124 minutes
Rating: Unrated 

Reviewer: Rodrigo Toromoreno (Toronto Correspondent) 

Borges' ‘labyrinthine' detective fiction, to use a word often associated with the author, is often recognized for its incessant exploration of philosophical issues while simultaneously offering the reader engrossing short stories. Regardless of the initial element that attracts people to his work, the reader often finds that the actual ‘investigations' carried out within each story are done by an ambivalent narrator who is at once part of the general narrative, yet excluded from the ‘plot'. While this preface may seem completely arbitrary to some and, according to the traditional image of the ‘film reviewer', pretentious to others, it allows for a greater appreciation of the documentary Forging a Nation.  

Comprised of historical footage and interviews with family members, the documentary works in a similar fashion to Borges' texts as the filmmaker tries to piece together his personal history. David Blaustein, an Argentine Jew, attempts to trace the story of his parents' emigration from Poland to Argentina in the 1920's. His method of inquiry consists of visiting archives of the cities in which his parents resided and using the information gathered there to guide the questions he poses to surviving relatives of that era. Older aunts and uncles share their experiences of rampant discrimination caused by the conflict of being Polish in a country whose primary language is Spanish. Even amongst other immigrants, the Blausteins found that they were ostracized because the predominant groups of foreigners were of Italian or Spanish origin. In effect, the second generation of Blausteins grew up in this hostile environment where they were forced to depend on their immediate family for support; developing a scepticism of anyone around them that, for some of the director's cousins, extended towards David's parents and siblings.

As the talking-heads documentary progresses, it reveals that-as in most families, immigrant or otherwise-a resentment towards the Blausteins that excelled professionally began to segregate them from each other. David's father was a Marxist scholar and practitioner, which not only subjected him to the political persecution that led him to leave his homeland, but also produced hostility towards him as his family branded him a self-sufficient idealist. In what may be classified as the film's most direct moment, one of the cousins openly states that the reason that he did not get along with the director was not due to their different financial situations, but because David's father was a man whose association to the Blausteins began and ended with his surname.  

In terms of aesthetics and directorial skill, David Blaustein avoids the use of close-ups in order to give the speakers an equal opportunity to communicate their story, never visually giving more emotional weight to one over the other. Essentially, the film, as David's brother mentions in one of his interviews, is about listening. Rising from the notion that everyone's personal story deserves the silver screen treatment, directors of these types of documentaries feel the need to manipulate the viewers into feeling sympathy and aim for interest that is never there (refer to the sensationalist film Capturing the Friedmans). Forging a Nation, however, does not pretend to present anything out of the ordinary, only what is felt by each member of the family; and in this respect, it succeeds in being a worthy addition to contemporary cinema verite without ever resorting to the real-time and handheld-camera techniques that plague this style.     

Like several of Borges' protagonists, David Blaustein may be physically ‘outside' the film (since he is never interviewed), an ethnic "other" to fellow Argentinians, and an outsider to the rest of his family members, but this division makes him part of a divided nation. This is not a documentary about a single family in a specific country, any family in any country that, precisely because they are ignored, forge a nation of ‘the abandoned'.