Film details
- Director
- Jeff Zorrilla
- Country
- Argentina
- Duration
- 24 min
- Language
- Spanish
- Writer
- Jeff Zorrilla, Mia Miceli
- Cinematographer
- Lucio Bonelli
- Producer
- Jeff Zorrilla
- Cast
- Valeria Correa, William Prociuk, Heinz Krattiger
Director’s statement
This film began with a grief and a suspicion: that the things we inherit — the houses, the trades, the ways of drinking and of keeping quiet — are not chosen, and that you can spend a whole life convinced you left your family behind while repeating, gesture by gesture, exactly what you swore never to repeat.
I make images compulsively. That is not a metaphor: I know from the inside the logic of the impulse, where you arrive at the thing — the glass, the camera, the island — believing you chose it. So the terror in this film does not live in a creature but in a question that follows me as an artist and as a father: what am I passing on to my children when I teach them to look? A craft, or a compulsion? The family in the film has been filming for generations. Nobody forces them. That is the horror.
The Tigre Delta is not a set. Less than an hour from Buenos Aires there are islands without roads, where the river is the only way in and the only way out, and where a family can slip outside of time without anyone noticing. We shot there, in digital and Super 8, in the real houses of the islands.
I want audiences to leave feeling that something escaped the projection. Not an explanation — a doubt they take home.
Synopsis
After his father's death, a man returns to the family house in the delta and finds a projector and a box of reels that seem to know he is watching.
When his father dies, Martín goes back to the isolated house in the river delta where he grew up to sort through what was left behind. Among his father's things he finds an old projector and a box of unlabeled reels. As he threads them one by one, what is on the film begins to feel less like a record of the past and more like something that has been waiting for him.
Jeff Zorrilla
Director
Jeff Zorrilla is an independent filmmaker born in the United States in 1984. He earned his BA in Film and Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and went on to study cinema at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, where he focused on the Dogma 95 movement. He later settled in New York, working as an assistant director on the feature New York, I Love You, in distribution at ThinkFilms, and as a programming assistant at Film Forum.
In 2010 he moved to Buenos Aires to pursue his passion for cinema. There he met independent filmmakers such as Ernesto Baca, Paulo Pécora and Ulises Rosell, who introduced him to the specific traditions and working methods of Argentine filmmaking. He continues to live and work in Buenos Aires.
He has directed numerous fiction, documentary and experimental shorts, most of them shot on Super 8 and 16mm and processed and scanned by hand. His first feature documentary, Monger (2016), about sex tourism in Buenos Aires, won awards at more than a dozen international festivals. His second feature, Diarios del encierro / Lockdown Diaries (2022), is a film diary shot during the pandemic. His latest film, Something Scary (Eso que asusta, 2026), is a horror short based on a story by Laird Barron, with an original score by Italian horror legend Fabio Frizzi (Zombie, The Beyond) and starring Valeria Correa (La Flor) and William Prociuk.
His work has been screened at festivals and cultural venues worldwide, including the Cannes Film Festival, the New York Latino Film Festival, IDFA, FIVA, Under Berlin Film Festival, ReelHeART International Film Festival, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, the CCCB (Barcelona), and experimental film programs in Japan, among others. His films are part of the collection of Light Cone (Paris).