The Future Perfect

(El futuro perfecto)

  • In person
featuring

Zhang Xiaobin, Saroj Kumar Malik, Jiang Mian,

Eighteen-year-old Xiaobin travels from China to Buenos Aires to join her conservative family who immigrated years earlier. Her parents, who refuse even to learn Spanish, want her to fit in with the Chinese immigrant community and marry a nice Chinese boy, but the low-key teenager with a quiet smile has a few surprises up her sleeve. She rebels by secretly taking a Spanish class, hiding her savings, and spending time outside class with one of her fellow students on the sly. As the students in the class improvise simple dialogues to practice what they’ve learned, Xiaobin turns new lessons learned into a new experience in life. Improvising scenarios for what she wishes would happen, or not happen, for Xiaobin the future perfect becomes not only a grammatical tense, but a way to imagine the life she wants to live. Director Nele Wohlatz recruited most of the cast, including her lead, from actual language-school students, and brilliantly uses their innocence and naïveté to create an atmosphere of spontaneity, realism, and genuine camaraderie. “The language school,” she says, “could be understood as a rehearsal stage for a new identity after immigration.”

Miguel Pendás
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Nele Wohlatz
Cinematographer
  • Roman Kasseroller
  • Agustina San Martín
Language
  • Spanish
  • Mandarin
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 65 mins