General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Historias Extraordinarias

Historias Extraordinarias (Extraordinary Stories) is a 2008 Argentine fiction film written and directed by Mariano Llinás, running 245 minutes and telling three parallel stories about three ordinary men, identified only as X, Z, and H, whose lives are upended by chance events and who never meet each other.¹^•² Made independently by the collective El Pampero Cine on a budget of roughly 30,000 dollars, it premiered at the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema (BAFICI) in April 2008, won Best Director and the Audience Award there, and became a landmark of independent Argentine cinema.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Mariano Llinás, who also plays X¹^•⁵
Runtime and structure	245 minutes, three acts of about 80 minutes each, 18 chapters, usually projected with two ten-minute intervals¹^•⁶
Protagonists	X (Mariano Llinás), Z (Walter Jakob), and H (Agustín Mendilaharzu), three men whose stories never cross⁶^•⁷
Production	El Pampero Cine with financing from I.Sat; budget about 30,000 dollars (another account gives about 35,000)⁴^•⁸
Premiere and awards	BAFICI, April 2008: Best Director and Audience Award; FIPRESCI prize at Cinélatino, Toulouse, 2009³^•⁹
Argentine release	4 October 2008⁷
Key crew	Cinematography Agustín Mendilaharzu; music Gabriel Chwojnik; editing Alejo Moguillansky and Agustín Rolandelli; production Laura Citarella⁵^•¹⁰

Spoilers

The three stories

The film alternates among three narratives, each driven by a fortuitous event that generates new stories. X, played by Llinás himself, witnesses a violent act and a murder, kills a man, and goes into hiding in a hotel in Buenos Aires Province, becoming an observer of the world around him.⁵^•⁶ Z takes a job in a small rural town replacing a manager who has just died, and out of boredom begins obsessively investigating his predecessor's increasingly mysterious life, discovering a notebook written in code and a map.⁵^•⁴ H is hired for a mission he never fully understands: to sail down the Salado River in a small boat, photographing and investigating a series of mysterious monolithic stone structures along its banks, the remains of an abandoned water project.⁵^•⁴

The three protagonists are deliberately treated as "non-characters", conductors of the narrative without psychologies or backgrounds, which is reinforced by the decision to name them only with single letters.⁶ The stories never intersect; their connection lies in the alternation and in the voice-over that binds them.²

Structure and narration

The film is organized into three acts of approximately 80 minutes each, divided into 18 clearly numbered chapters, so the viewer always knows which story, and which part of it, is on screen.⁶^•¹¹ Llinás organized the intercalated stories the way a novelist would, and the film is generally described as novelistic rather than theatrical in its storytelling.¹¹^•¹

Voice-over carries the film. Three narrators, Daniel Hendler, Juan Minujín, and Verónica Llinás, read a text that describes what is not shown, comments on characters, makes marginal asides, and plays with the viewer; critics have called it among the best-written voice-over in Argentine cinema.¹² The narration pushes the story forward continuously, replacing quiet observation with a torrent of ideas, anecdotes, and references.⁵

Literary and cinematic models

Llinás has pointed not to the austere figures usually associated with the New Argentine Cinema, such as Bresson, Cassavetes, or Antonioni, but to Louis Feuillade's serials, Jorge Luis Borges, and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy as the film's models.⁵ Festival writing has compared the film, were it literature, to works by Robert Louis Stevenson and Borges.¹³ The critic Roger Alan Koza also traces its procedures to Tristram Shandy, the adventures of Tintin, and Stevenson, set against the towns, municipal buildings, and Salado River landscapes of Buenos Aires Province, including the extravagant architecture of Francisco Salamone.¹⁴

Formally, the film mixes still photographs in the manner of Chris Marker's La jetée, split screens, fixed shots, and unorthodox camera movements, and includes a passage playing on André Bazin's concept of "forbidden montage" in which Z shares a room with a lion.¹⁴ Its opening murder is narrated from a distance in a single fixed shot, a sequence critics have compared to the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men.¹⁰

Production

The film could not have been made without El Pampero Cine, the production company Llinás co-founded in 2002, whose stated principle is "producing cinema without producers": directors who fund and make films on their own terms, without financiers who can alter the script, and who premiere at BAFICI or alternative venues rather than commercial theaters.⁸ The channel I.Sat financed the project.⁴ Accounts of the total cost differ: the Google Play description gives 30,000 dollars, while a retrospective published by the Argentine government gives about 35,000 dollars for the 245-minute film, shot in natural locations.⁴^•⁸

It was shot on video (MiniDV), and differentiated itself from other Argentine productions through a small crew and actors with little or no film experience, whose roles were often flexible or interchangeable.³^•⁴ The crew became the core of El Pampero's later work: Mendilaharzu on cinematography, Citarella on production, Moguillansky on editing.⁸

Reception and legacy

At BAFICI 2008 the film won Best Director in the Argentine competition and the Audience Award, and it went on to festivals including Torino, Miami, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Nantes, and Vienna, where it had its European premiere at the Viennale; it was released in New York in 2011.³^•⁶ It received the FIPRESCI prize at the 21st Rencontres de Toulouse (Cinélatino) in 2009.⁹ Despite its length, cheap video, and a director then known only to a small audience, it became a commercial hit in Argentina.³

Critics have treated the film as a turning point for independent Argentine cinema. It received no public funding and helped establish a new way of distributing small independent films outside official channels; the director Matías Piñeiro called it possibly "the greatest hit ever in independent contemporary cinema" in Argentina.¹⁵ Scholars place it as a renewal of the promise of an alternative Argentine cinema at the moment the first wave of the New Argentine Cinema was seen as exhausted, and contrast its shoestring independence with the Oscar-winning mainstream success of El secreto de sus ojos (2009).²

The film also established the scale of Llinás's later ambitions: his next fiction feature, La Flor (2018), runs about fourteen hours.¹ In 2025 a restored and remastered digital copy, prepared by Warner Bros. Discovery's post-production team, was re-released at MALBA in Buenos Aires and made available on HBO Max.¹⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026