Celebrated Argentinian artist Lina survives a fall in the icy waters of a lake in Switzerland, triggering a haunting journey through trauma, memory, and motherhood. Milagros Mumenthaler’s bold third feature immerses us in Lina’s fractured world — beautiful, fragile, and charged with emotional urgency.
Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), an accomplished, uncompromising Argentinian artist and designer, is in Switzerland to receive an award. In a powerful and symbolic film opening for the times, she falls from a bridge into the frigid waters below. In that moment, she later confesses to an old friend, she encounters deep peace — until the thought of her young daughter pulls her back. The aftermath of the incident leaves her with a paralysing phobia of water, a painful disconnection from the world she has wilfully built for herself, and a growing sense of isolation and fragility that threatens her creative drive and personal relationships, while forcing her to confront buried questions about identity, purpose, and belonging.
For her third feature film, director Milagros Mumenthaler (Back to Stay, TIFF ’11) crafts a carefully observed and acute narrative that allows room to fully discover who Lina really is, through both her personal history and her everyday struggles with deep-seated dissidence, discomfort, and fear. This is a vividly detailed, tactile universe that’s pierced by beauty and tension. The Currents moves in ways that create a kind of suspension, an atmosphere that unveils the dreamlike, hallucinatory state of mind in which Lina lives, or barely survives.
DIANA CADAVID
Content advisory: mature themes, themes of suicide
Screenings
TIFF Lightbox 3
TIFF Lightbox 3
Scotiabank 7
Scotiabank 8
Scotiabank 8