Natasha Gurfinkel

A sunny morning in Buenos Aires. All seems quiet, but then an odd race begins: a variety of people are after a backpack. A little army of seekers surprises us at every corner. Suddenly, a lonely bureaucrat (Mapache) is involved in this adventure, and new, mysterious and unknown people start to populate his life, all running around the popular Argentinian city to obtain the backpack which seems to be crucial to his own fate, according to the words of his new accomplice, magician and tarot reader Luminitsia.

Matías and his younger brother Jaime are left to their own devices in an adult world. When Jaime is caught stealing, Matías must convince a stranger to act as their father.

In Boulogne, Buenos Aires, a 200-plus-year-old Japanese Minka (民家; literally translated as “house of the people”) stands as the oldest dwelling in Argentina. La Casa de Japón, a residence which also functions as a museum, contains one of the largest historical Japanese craft collections outside Japan. The Minka itself was dismantled and transported 20,000 km from the mountains of Fukui in Japan, via Nagoya, to Buenos Aires in the 1980s. More than two decades later, after years of careful planning, research and restoration, the museum opened its doors to the public in 2006.

The water boils to get dinner ready, while some others feed from tragic love. The curtain rises.