Year: 2022
Country: Argentina, Germany
Length: 83 min
Language: Spanish, German
Subtitles: English, Spanish
Director: Leandro Listorti
Producer: Paula Zyngierman, Leandro Listorti
Screenwriter: Leandro Listorti
Cinematographer: Fidel González Armatta
Editor: Leandro Listorti
Sound: Roberta Ainstein
Sales: Kino Rebelde
Herbaria is a film about preservation work of two symbiotic universes, the botanical and film, and everything they share: the delicacy of their manual art, the resistance of their method against the passage of time, the power of the image over the power of oblivion. The future of humanity rests on these people who try to preserve the beauty and memory of a world that insists on disappearing.
With the presence of the director.
Leandro Listorti (1976, Buenos Aires). Film director, programmer and projectionist born in Argentina. His first feature “Death Youth” (2010) premiered at IDFA and was part of Viennale and Doclisboa, among others. From 2005 to 2015 he was programmer at the Buenos Aires Int’l Independent Film Festival (BAFICI). In 2018 he premiered “The Endless Film” at IFFR Rotterdam. His second feature film “Herbaria” (2022) premieres in the Burning Lights Competition at Visions Du Réel Int’l Documentary Film Festival Nyon.
With Herbaria Leandro Listorti proposes an unprecedented parallel between the botanical herbarium and the film archive, exploring their common roots – the same desire to discover, represent and capture the ephemeral in order to make it last in time. But botanical collections, like cinematographic films, are fragile and subject to similar processes of deterioration. Listorti pays homage to the archive (film and botanical) as an operation of cataloguing the world and recording diversity, representing the tireless and obstinate work of preserving something in constant risk of disappearing.
Margot Mecca
MajorDocs programmer