Critics reviews

It's quite possible to settle comfortably into the viewpoint of his loving gaze and treat the film as a 74-minute compilation of gorgeous home movies. But that would be unfair to the filmmaking accomplishment of Solnicki... who ultimately pared down over 200 hours of footage, spanning a decade; and who emerged with a poignant documentary about the legacy of a traumatic past as experienced across four generations.

In "Papirosen," the Argentine filmmaker Gastón Solnicki trains his camera on four generations of his wildly volatile Jewish family, folding 10 years of modern footage into a visual collage that covers more than half a century. Instead of a dignified stroll down genealogy lane, Mr. Solnicki has made a sparking, gossipy soap opera that's riddled with emotion and stuffed with strong characters.

...Solnicki avoids such gaucheness to be so evident in Papirosen by effacing his physical self from his own self-ethnography and by avoiding to choose protagonists. His mapping out his family's narrative from within never feels exploitative or self-absorbed. While Polley tried to straighten out secrets and lies in Stories We Tell, and Tarnation somatized the schizophrenia of its very subject (Caouette's mother), Parpirosen offers us simplicity and contemplation as a form of inquiry.

"Papirosen" is simultaneously intimate and oblique, with a challenging back and forth structure that ranges over seven decades and several continents—in less than 70 minutes—with Solnicki's parents and sister continually aging, de-aging, and re-aging before our eyes. Essentially, the movie is a vortex in which displacement is the natural state of affairs.

One of the better works in the Rotterdam program, a personal cinéma-vérité family chronicle that mixed Sylvania Waters-style ‘TV reality soap' with the sometimes agonisingly self-conscious introspection and relentless interrogation of Argentina's psychoanalysis-mad culture.