Moebius

Directed by Gustavo Mosquera, this Argentine science fiction film was the first feature produced by the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires and was made entirely by the school's students. A train vanishes in the subway with thirty passengers aboard, the whole network is searched and nothing is found, and the authorities call in Daniel Pratt, a young topologist. Pratt discovers that a newly added perimeter line has turned the network into a closed Möbius strip, and that under the right conditions the train slips into another dimension. He is removed from the case, completes his theory alone, and finally boards the train. At the end the authorities find it empty and order silence about the whole affair, and then another train disappears. The allegory is explicit: between 1976 and 1983 the Argentine military dictatorship abducted roughly thirty thousand people, who became known as the disappeared precisely because the crimes were concealed, and the film's thirty vanished passengers and official silencing point directly at that trauma. The screenplay was rewritten eight times over a year with no funding secured, the crew numbered forty five students, an abandoned subway station was refurbished as the main set, and a hand cranked 1926 camera was modified to produce in camera effects. A 2000 poll placed it twenty ninth among the hundred best Argentine films. Who it's for: Admirers of low budget science fiction working through political allegory, and of Latin American cinema. Who it's not for: Not for viewers wanting action or a clear explanation, since the film is deliberately cold, slow and unresolved.