One in a Thousand

Clad in sportswear, 17-year-old Iris dribbles her basketball through the wide courtyards of her social housing estate somewhere in Argentina. She has been expelled from school and spends the warm days and nights with her two best friends – her cousins – in cramped rooms, fiddling with her mobile phone, or on the empty streets of the town. While playing hide-and-seek, the boys disappear with other boys, they strip off in front of the webcam and write passionate texts in which they rail against a hetero-normative society. There is a deceptive lightness in the air and the promise that, when it comes to love and sex, anything is possible. When cool and self-confident Renata enters the scene, Iris is fascinated, and it is not long before they begin flirting. But on the estate, the rumours about Renata’s past are getting louder and louder.

Describing a world where her protagonists are caught between coming out and cyber-bullying, community life and poverty, love and violence, director Clarisa Navas captures the transition between the tenderness of childhood and the bitter reality of the adult world in floating images that often have a distinctly documentary feel.

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