Man Facing Southeast

Man Facing Southeast (Spanish: Hombre mirando al sudeste) is a 1986 Argentine drama-science fiction film written and directed by Eliseo Subiela, in which a mysterious patient named Rantes appears in a Buenos Aires psychiatric hospital and claims to be an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to study human behavior.^{1 • 2} The film runs 105 minutes, was produced in Argentina, and became a cult classic that was selected as the Argentine entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 60th Academy Awards.^{1 • 3}

Origin of the story

Subiela traced the film to a real image. In a 2016 interview, a few months before his death, he described a man who stood for years on a corner in his Buenos Aires neighborhood, motionless for hours in sun and rain, facing a direction Subiela calculated to be the southeast.¹⁰ He later learned that the man was looking at the window of a nurse he had fallen in love with during a stay in a psychiatric hospital, but at the time the image alone was enough: he decided to make a film called Hombre mirando and fixed the title on the cardinal point.¹⁰

Production and release

The film was produced by Cinequanon, with Lujan Pflaum as executive producer, on a budget of $600,000.^{4 • 7} It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September 1986, screened in the Official Section of the 34th San Sebastián Festival that same month, and opened in Argentina on 2 April 1987, with releases in the United States (13 March 1987), Uruguay, and Australia.^{11 • 6} Its Spanish theatrical release came much later, on 25 November 1993, drawing 22,715 admissions and €64,646.97.⁴

Recognition. The film received one Goya nomination, for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film, and won nine Cóndor de Plata awards in 1988, including best film, director, actor, cinematography, editing, music, screenplay, and both new-actor categories.⁷ It was selected as Argentina's entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 60th Academy Awards.¹ Kino Lorber released it on DVD and Blu-ray in the United States in 2016, the first time it had been available on US home video.³

Themes and interpretation

The film holds two readings in suspension: the "real" story of a paranoid, delusional schizophrenic, or the "surreal" science fiction tale of a man who can control objects with his mind.¹² The scholar David William Foster, a literary and cultural critic long associated with Arizona State University's work on Latin American culture, observed that the film uses the genre of science fiction in a "systematic subversion of dominant ideologies" while avoiding fixity in its portrayal of a radical individual cast out by society; for Foster, this "ideological indecisiveness" serves to universalize the story.¹² Reviewers have read it as a Christ allegory retooled for the twentieth century, with the mentally ill standing in for the poor in spirit and the imposition of psychoactive drugs in place of a crucifixion.⁹

The film's ambiguity is deliberate and extends to its ending. Rantes displays apparent telekinesis, and Beatriz dribbles a blue fluid, yet the film also roots both characters in a human past.⁹ Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that when asked whether Rantés is what he claims to be, the film answers with a decided "yes and no."¹ Among its best-remembered images are Rantes conducting an open-air orchestra in Beethoven's Ode to Joy, and the final vision of the patients standing in a circle waiting for the spaceship to return.⁹

Legacy

Kino Lorber's 2016 release introduced the film to new audiences and described it as "one of the great science fiction films."³ Scholarship on Subiela, including a 2022 monograph by Nancy Membrez and essay collections on his cinema, treats Man Facing Southeast as a central work of a director whose films persistently questioned the boundary between madness and vision; Fernando Reati of Georgia State University has examined the presence and absence of the disappeared in the film, situating it in the Argentina of the early democratic transition after the 1983 return to constitutional rule.^{13 • 14}

References

1. Hombre mirando al sudeste, trigon-film
2. Man Facing Southeast (1986), Rotten Tomatoes
3. Man Facing Southeast, Kino Lorber Theatrical
4. HOMBRE MIRANDO AL SUDESTE, ICAA Film Database
5. Man Facing Southeast (Hombre mirando al sudeste), AFI FEST 1987
6. Hombre mirando al sudeste, San Sebastián Film Festival 1986
7. Hombre mirando al sudeste, Cine.com
8. Hombre mirando al sudeste (Man Facing Southeast), Film Fest Gent
9. Man Facing Southeast (1986), Moria: The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
10. Entrevista a Eliseo Subiela, Texas A&M University Library
11. Hombre mirando al sudeste (1986) release info, IMDb
12. Controlling Contagion: The Threat of the Madman from Outer Space (Corbin), West Chester University
13. Eliseo Subiela interview on madness and Hombre mirando al sudeste, Vimeo (Nancy Membrez)
14. The Cinematic Art of Eliseo Subiela, essay collection table of contents

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Science fiction and fantasy films (individual works) › Science fiction and fantasy films of the 1980s › Released 1986 to 1989

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

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