# La Flor
**La Flor** is a 2018 Argentine episodic film written and directed by Mariano Llinás, composed of six stories of different genres united by the same four actresses and running 808 minutes according to FICUNAM's catalog, or 14 hours 28 minutes according to its distributor Grasshopper Film.[1](https://ficunam.unam.mx/pelicula/la-flor/) • [2](https://grasshopperfilm.com/film/la-flor/) Filmed over a span of ten years, it reflects on fiction itself and is considered the follow-up to Llinás's four-hour *Historias extraordinarias* (2008).[1](https://ficunam.unam.mx/pelicula/la-flor/) • [3](https://revista.directoresav.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/revistas_pdf/revista_directores_n032.pdf)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Director, year | Mariano Llinás, 2018, Argentina; produced by El Pampero Cine, producer Laura Citarella[1](https://ficunam.unam.mx/pelicula/la-flor/) |
| Running time | 808 minutes per FICUNAM; 14 h 28 m per the distributor[1](https://ficunam.unam.mx/pelicula/la-flor/) • [2](https://grasshopperfilm.com/film/la-flor/) |
| Structure | Six episodes: four with beginnings but no endings, one self-contained story, one ending without a beginning[4](https://icsfilm.org/reviews/thessaloniki-international-film-festival-review-la-flor-mariano-llinas/) |
| Cast constant | Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes of the Piel de Lava collective appear in all episodes but one[1](https://ficunam.unam.mx/pelicula/la-flor/) • [4](https://icsfilm.org/reviews/thessaloniki-international-film-festival-review-la-flor-mariano-llinas/) |
| Production span | Filmed over ten years[1](https://ficunam.unam.mx/pelicula/la-flor/) |
| Festivals and awards | Locarno 2018 (in competition); BAFICI 2018 Best Film Award; Toronto, New York, London, and Vienna festivals, among others[5](https://www.ica.art/media/02240.pdf) • [1](https://ficunam.unam.mx/pelicula/la-flor/) |
| Critical reception | Metascore 77, "generally favorable"[6](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/la-flor/critic-reviews/) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
At an isolated archaeological dig in the Argentine countryside, a small team of researchers excavates a tomb. A mummy comes out of the ground, and with it a curse that begins picking the team off. The four actresses play the dig's members and hangers-on in a horror picture styled after an American B-movie, shot on MiniDV with shallow focus, abundant close-ups, and faux old-fashioned opening credits.[19](https://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-long-view/) • [20](https://www.reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/2493/la_flor) The episode behaves exactly like a cheap 1940s Val Lewton chiller: shadows, portents, a monster that stays mostly unseen. Then, at the moment a real horror film would stage its climax, the story simply stops. No resolution, no explanation, no ending. The screen cuts away and a new set of credits begins.
Before this first story, the film has already shown its hand: Llinás himself, coffee in hand at a roadside rest stop, explains to the audience how the next fourteen hours will be organized, six episodes, multiple intermissions, and a warning that the first four stories have no endings. He is telling the truth.[21](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/la-flor/)
**Episode 2** is a musical, of a kind, with a touch of mystery. The same four women reappear in new roles in a story laced with song numbers and romantic entanglements, a lighter register after the tomb. It, too, builds toward a resolution its genre has trained the audience to expect, and it, too, is cut off before arriving anywhere.
**Episode 3** runs more than five hours on its own, a Cold War-era espionage thriller spanning years and countries, from Russia to Berlin to the Colombian jungle.[4](https://icsfilm.org/reviews/thessaloniki-international-film-festival-review-la-flor-mariano-llinas/) • [19](https://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-long-view/) Four female agents, played once again by the four leads, are operating in the field and hiding from a rival gang of four. Llinás grants each principal character a long nested origin story, so the episode keeps branching backward before it moves forward: how a woman became a spy, who trained her, who betrayed whom. The plotting is genuinely tense, the locations genuinely far-flung, and the film sustains real genre pleasure for the length of two ordinary features. And then the same thing happens. At the edge of the third act, the story stops.
**Episode 4** is the hardest to describe, a meta-fiction set around a film production, with the four actresses playing versions of actresses on a shoot. It is here that Llinás's visual ambitions shift visibly: he later said that from this episode on he drew on painting, particularly Manet, and the Casanova scenes within it are lit like 18th-century canvases.[22](https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/nyff-what-is-one-to-do-with-mariano-llinas-s-14-hour-la-flor) In the Casanova story, the four women are revealed to be members of a misandrist secret society working in concert: each wins Casanova's heart, and each, teasing him with the promise of happiness, withholds from him any release. It is the film's structure turned into a plot, four stories of buildup without climax embodied by four lovers who never deliver.[20](https://www.reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/2493/la_flor) This episode, too, is left unfinished. What follows it is not a new story but the emotional centerpiece of the whole film: a long, wordless sequence of the four actresses on location, wandering in nature, sometimes pensive, sometimes posing, sometimes frankly flirting with the camera, at one point flashing a bare breast. Narrative is tossed aside entirely, and for a stretch the film becomes pure presence, four faces and a landscape.[22](https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/nyff-what-is-one-to-do-with-mariano-llinas-s-14-hour-la-flor) • [20](https://www.reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/2493/la_flor)
**Episode 5** changes the rules. The four leads are absent for the only time in the film, and two new actresses step in for a black-and-white remake of [Jean Renoir](https://www.edgepedia.org/jean-renoir)'s 1936 film [A Day in the Country](https://www.edgepedia.org/a-day-in-the-country), itself adapted from a [Guy de Maupassant](https://www.edgepedia.org/guy-de-maupassant) story, with the rowers of the original swapped for Argentine gauchos.[10](https://thefilmstage.com/locarno-review-la-flor-is-an-audacious-deeply-moving-triumph-of-storytelling/) Renoir's film was famously left unfinished; Llinás finishes it. A woman on an outing to the countryside is courted by a gaucho, the encounter is charged and then lost, and years later she returns to the same spot. Unlike everything before it, this story is self-contained. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Between its movements, the film cuts to shots of airplanes crossing the sky, images that belong to no story at all and are among the most celebrated in the whole fourteen hours.[22](https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/nyff-what-is-one-to-do-with-mariano-llinas-s-14-hour-la-flor)
**Episode 6** returns to the four women for the finale, and it begins in the middle of itself. It is an enigmatic allegory based on the diary of Sarah S. Evans, an Englishwoman who was held captive in 19th-century South America and escaped.[4](https://icsfilm.org/reviews/thessaloniki-international-film-festival-review-la-flor-mariano-llinas/) • [10](https://thefilmstage.com/locarno-review-la-flor-is-an-audacious-deeply-moving-triumph-of-storytelling/) Shot with a camera obscura and lit like a Da Vinci painting, it is quieter and stranger than anything before it: the genre masks finally off, a story of captivity, endurance, and release told at a hush. Because it begins in medias res, the film's habit of starting mid-story becomes, for once, a form rather than a refusal. It ends, the only episode that truly does, with the camera turned upside down, spinning, until the image reveals the director and the film crew standing in the landscape, the makers appearing inside the made thing as the whole fourteen-hour structure closes its petals.[4](https://icsfilm.org/reviews/thessaloniki-international-film-festival-review-la-flor-mariano-llinas/) Then come forty minutes of closing credits, a very long non-goodbye.[19](https://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-long-view/)
### Characters
The four leads form a repertory company that recombines in every episode, and part of the film's pleasure is tracking each woman's range. Pilar Gamboa moves from genre heroine to a figure who literally goes from supreme voice to mute between episodes. Elisa Carricajo grows in authority across the run, from minion in the horror episode to coven leader in the Casanova story.[23](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/la-flor-review-mariano-llinas-teases-13-12-hours-before-your-eyes) Valeria Correa and Laura Paredes rotate through agents, lovers, researchers, and captives, each episode recalibrating the quartet like musicians trading who carries the melody.
Mariano Llinás appears as himself in the opening scene, the filmmaker as barker at his own circus, and returns in the final image with his crew.[21](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/la-flor/)
### Interpretations and controversies
The film's central provocation, four endings withheld, has generated its share of debate. Some viewers read the truncation as cheating; the stronger reading, advanced by critics, is that incompletion is the film's actual subject, a meditation on stories and lives that stop mid-sentence, with the Renoir remake as the answer: a film about finishing a masterpiece that its maker left unfinished.[19](https://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-long-view/) The misandrist secret society of the Casanova episode is widely read as Llinás's own confession, the four actresses teasing the audience with genre pleasure and withholding the release, exactly as they tease Casanova.[20](https://www.reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/2493/la_flor) Because the episodes are presented in the order they were shot, viewers and critics also treat the film as a nine-year record of a filmmaker's evolution, which makes every reading provisional: the film is also a diary of its own making.[22](https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/nyff-what-is-one-to-do-with-mariano-llinas-s-14-hour-la-flor)
### Sequels, prequels, and universe
There is no sequel, but the film's world continued. Producer Laura Citarella's Trenque Lauquen (2022), a four-hour-plus film built with and around Laura Paredes, is the most visible descendant of the El Pampero Cine project that La Flor crowned.[24](https://sightlines.media/film/423778/la-flor-2019)
## Structure
The film opens with Llinás himself, sitting outdoors with a red notebook, drawing the diagram that gives the film its name: a flower of six petals. He explains, in a voice-over delivered without moving his lips, what the viewer is about to see.[4](https://icsfilm.org/reviews/thessaloniki-international-film-festival-review-la-flor-mariano-llinas/) • [7](https://www.scielo.br/j/ea/a/PPKmSvqV3JZJsbZpyWyhSPK/?format=html) The scheme is explicit: the first four episodes begin but do not end; the fifth both begins and ends, like a tale; the sixth starts already in progress and finishes everything.[8](https://revistamutaciones.com/la-flor-mariano-llinas/) In the diagram, four petals point upward, a semi-circle sits at the flower's center, and an arrow points downward to the ground, the ending.[4](https://icsfilm.org/reviews/thessaloniki-international-film-festival-review-la-flor-mariano-llinas/)
The six episodes, with their genres as announced by the director, are:[8](https://revistamutaciones.com/la-flor-mariano-llinas/) • [9](https://un-film-un-jour.com/index.php/2019/05/13/la-flor/)
1. A fantasy [B movie](https://www.edgepedia.org/b-movie), "the kind of film Americans once were able to make with their eyes closed, and now can't anymore", in which a mummy wreaks havoc in a laboratory.[8](https://revistamutaciones.com/la-flor-mariano-llinas/) • [10](https://thefilmstage.com/locarno-review-la-flor-is-an-audacious-deeply-moving-triumph-of-storytelling/)
2. A romantic melodrama, heavily musical, with a parallel mystery plot.[8](https://revistamutaciones.com/la-flor-mariano-llinas/)
3. A spy thriller about four female spies.[8](https://revistamutaciones.com/la-flor-mariano-llinas/)
4. A part the director himself says he cannot define: a homage to surrealism and a metalinguistic look at the making of a film that never ends, in which a director stand-in abandons his project, titled "The Spider", and starts filming shots of trees.[8](https://revistamutaciones.com/la-flor-mariano-llinas/) • [4](https://icsfilm.org/reviews/thessaloniki-international-film-festival-review-la-flor-mariano-llinas/)
5. A silent, black-and-white remake of Jean Renoir's *A Day in the Country*, 41 minutes long, with no sound except a few minutes of audio from a Renoir film and an unexplained aerial flyover.[8](https://revistamutaciones.com/la-flor-mariano-llinas/) • [7](https://www.scielo.br/j/ea/a/PPKmSvqV3JZJsbZpyWyhSPK/?format=html)
6. The liberation of women held captive in the nineteenth century, crossing a desert in the manner of western caravan films.[9](https://un-film-un-jour.com/index.php/2019/05/13/la-flor/)
Episode lengths vary widely: the French review *Un film, un jour* gives the longest as 5 hours 20 minutes and the last as 22 minutes.[9](https://un-film-un-jour.com/index.php/2019/05/13/la-flor/) There are few overt narrative links between episodes, but images and themes recur, including queens, cats, duels, arachnids, and airplanes, with the context changing along with the genres.[11](https://nwfilmforum.org/news/structure-mariano-llinass-la-flor-like-freeze-tag-improv-massive-cinematic-canvas/) Llinás reappears between chapters, breaking the fourth wall in wry voice-over and mocking the undertaking's running time.[4](https://icsfilm.org/reviews/thessaloniki-international-film-festival-review-la-flor-mariano-llinas/)
## Production and people
Mariano Llinás (Buenos Aires, 1975) studied at the Universidad del Cine, where he now teaches, and co-founded the production company El Pampero Cine in 2002.[3](https://revista.directoresav.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/revistas_pdf/revista_directores_n032.pdf) • [5](https://www.ica.art/media/02240.pdf) His features before *La Flor* were *Balnearios* (2002), *La más bella niña* (2004), *Tres fábulas de Villa Ocampo* (2011), and *Historias extraordinarias* (2008), which won the jury and audience awards at BAFICI.[3](https://revista.directoresav.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/revistas_pdf/revista_directores_n032.pdf) • [5](https://www.ica.art/media/02240.pdf)
The four actresses of the Piel de Lava collective, Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes, carry all the episodes except the fifth, playing radically different roles; Llinás has said the film is "of, by, and for" the four of them.[1](https://ficunam.unam.mx/pelicula/la-flor/) • [4](https://icsfilm.org/reviews/thessaloniki-international-film-festival-review-la-flor-mariano-llinas/) • [8](https://revistamutaciones.com/la-flor-mariano-llinas/) The credited crew includes Agustín Mendilaharzu on cinematography, Alejo Moguillansky on editing, Gabriel Chwojnik on music, and Rodrigo Sánchez Mariño on sound.[1](https://ficunam.unam.mx/pelicula/la-flor/)
## Release and reception
*La Flor* premiered in three parts across three days at the 2018 Locarno Film Festival and screened at BAFICI, Toronto, New York, London, Rotterdam, and Vienna, among others, winning the Best Film Award at BAFICI 2018.[12](https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/experiencing-mariano-llinas-s-la-flor) • [5](https://www.ica.art/media/02240.pdf) Grasshopper Film released it in the United States in 2019, and the ICA released it in the UK and Ireland on 13 September 2019, the first of Llinás's films to reach British screens.[2](https://grasshopperfilm.com/film/la-flor/) • [5](https://www.ica.art/media/02240.pdf)
Critics were broadly positive. On Metacritic the film holds a Metascore of 77 from eight reviews, seven positive and one mixed.[6](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/la-flor/critic-reviews/) Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times called it "the definition of a must-see"; A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote that it is "perhaps more fun to think about than to sit through, though there are some exquisitely beautiful sequences"; Simon Abrams of RogerEbert.com was the dissenting mixed review, comparing the experience to the last legs of a road trip with people you have grown alienated from.[6](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/la-flor/critic-reviews/) The Film Stage's Locarno review described it as creating its own language of ellipsis, flashbacks, flashforwards, and constant metafictional games.[10](https://thefilmstage.com/locarno-review-la-flor-is-an-audacious-deeply-moving-triumph-of-storytelling/) It appeared on numerous ten-best lists and was ranked #2 on Remezcla's list of the 25 best Latin American films of the decade.[2](https://grasshopperfilm.com/film/la-flor/)
## Other uses of the name
The Spanish phrase "la flor" (the flower) is used as a name by unrelated businesses and places. These include La Flor Dominicana, a Dominican cigar brand made by Tabacalera La Flor SA whose releases are reviewed by the cigar site halfwheel;[13](https://es.halfwheel.com/reviewlist/) laflor, a bean-to-bar chocolate maker in Zurich that buys cacao directly from farmers in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador;[14](https://laflor.ch/en/fragen-antworten/) La Flor, a floral design studio in Hawaii serving weddings and corporate events;[15](https://www.laflorevents.com/get-in-touch) La Flōr, a licensed cannabis dispensary in Fairfax, California;[16](https://laflorfairfax.com/) the Refugio de Vida Silvestre La Flor, a protected beach in Rivas, Nicaragua, about 20 km south of San Juan del Sur, where thousands of olive ridley (paslama) sea turtles come ashore to nest in mass arrivals, or arribadas, from July to January;[17](https://viajacongus.com/nicaragua/la-flor/) and La Flor, a line of young wines from Argentina's Pulenta estate in Mendoza, including a Malbec of which 250,000 bottles were produced in 2017.[18](https://www.wine.com/product/pulenta-la-flor-malbec-2017/402650)
## References
1. [La flor, FICUNAM film catalog](https://ficunam.unam.mx/pelicula/la-flor/)
2. [La Flor, Grasshopper Film](https://grasshopperfilm.com/film/la-flor/)
3. [Entrevista a Mariano Llinás, Revista Directores](https://revista.directoresav.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/revistas_pdf/revista_directores_n032.pdf)
4. [Thessaloniki International Film Festival review: La Flor, ICS Film](https://icsfilm.org/reviews/thessaloniki-international-film-festival-review-la-flor-mariano-llinas/)
5. [La Flor press release, Institute of Contemporary Arts](https://www.ica.art/media/02240.pdf)
6. [La Flor Critic Reviews, Metacritic](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/la-flor/critic-reviews/)
7. [La flor, de Mariano Llinás: o cinema reencontra a literatura, SciELO Brasil](https://www.scielo.br/j/ea/a/PPKmSvqV3JZJsbZpyWyhSPK/?format=html)
8. [La flor, de Mariano Llinás, la película de más de 14 horas, Revista Mutaciones](https://revistamutaciones.com/la-flor-mariano-llinas/)
9. [La Flor, Un film, un jour](https://un-film-un-jour.com/index.php/2019/05/13/la-flor/)
10. [Locarno Review: La Flor, The Film Stage](https://thefilmstage.com/locarno-review-la-flor-is-an-audacious-deeply-moving-triumph-of-storytelling/)
11. [On the structure of Mariano Llinás' LA FLOR, Northwest Film Forum](https://nwfilmforum.org/news/structure-mariano-llinass-la-flor-like-freeze-tag-improv-massive-cinematic-canvas/)
12. [Experiencing Mariano Llinás's "La Flor", MUBI Notebook](https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/experiencing-mariano-llinas-s-la-flor)
13. [Lista de revisión, halfwheel](https://es.halfwheel.com/reviewlist/)
14. [FAQ, laflor](https://laflor.ch/en/fragen-antworten/)
15. [La Flor events, Hawaii](https://www.laflorevents.com/get-in-touch)
16. [La Flōr dispensary, Fairfax, CA](https://laflorfairfax.com/)
17. [Refugio de Vida Silvestre La Flor, Nicaragua](https://viajacongus.com/nicaragua/la-flor/)
18. [Pulenta La Flor Malbec 2017, Wine.com](https://www.wine.com/product/pulenta-la-flor-malbec-2017/402650)
19. [https://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-long-view/](https://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-long-view/)
20. [https://www.reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/2493/la_flor](https://www.reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/2493/la_flor)
21. [https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/la-flor/](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/la-flor/)
22. [https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/nyff-what-is-one-to-do-with-mariano-llinas-s-14-hour-la-flor](https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/nyff-what-is-one-to-do-with-mariano-llinas-s-14-hour-la-flor)
23. [https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/la-flor-review-mariano-llinas-teases-13-12-hours-before-your-eyes](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/la-flor-review-mariano-llinas-teases-13-12-hours-before-your-eyes)
24. [https://sightlines.media/film/423778/la-flor-2019](https://sightlines.media/film/423778/la-flor-2019)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2015 to 2019 › Drama films 2017 and 2018*
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