Santiago

Santiago is a story about a beloved butler. No, that won’t do: Santiago follows a man from Buenos Aires who dances, plays castanets and piano, arranges flowers to perfection, recites poetry that reflects his life. That doesn’t sound right either: Santiago depicts someone who spends his life documenting the lives of the world’s aristocrats, amassing more than 30,000 pages of notes. Inspired visually by Ozu, documentarian João Moreira Salles (brother of Walter, the director of The Motorcycle Diaries) started making this film about the servant that most inspired his childhood in 1992, but was ultimately frustrated in attempting to edit the gorgeously photographed material together. In the interim, his subsequent work including News from a Private War, Entreatos and Nelson Freire has brought Salles to the forefront of Brazil’s burgeoning documentary scene. Thirteen years later and long after Santiago’s death, he returns to the footage to discover how the process of documenting a most personal memory leaves the filmmaker as caught on screen as his subject. This quietly raw meditation on memory, identity and documentary (indeed, the film’s subtitle, A Reflection on Raw Footage, eventually cuts in two directions) is reminiscent of Raoul Peck’s 1992 documentary Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, with the world leader replaced by a most extraordinary servant, but the final impact is both beautiful and haunting. –Tribeca