The Future Perfect

Seventeen year old Xiaobin arrives in Buenos Aires from China without a word of Spanish. She takes a job in a Chinese grocery and saves for language classes, and along the way begins a relationship with a young Indian man called Vijay. The film moves forward together with the Spanish she is learning: the sentences begin short and correct, like those in a primary school book, and then grow more complex. When Xiaobin grasps the conditional tense she starts building possible futures as well, and the film shows several of them at once. Nele Wohlatz’s sixty five minute Argentine production was shot in Spanish and Mandarin. Zhang Xiaobing plays Xiaobin. It won the prize for best first feature at the Locarno Film Festival in 2016.