If Damian Szifron’s “Wild Tales” (Relatos Salvajes) wins the Oscar for best foreign film on Feb. 22 (it was nominated last week), it will be Argentina’s third Oscar and the first for a film directed by an Argentine Jew.
The film, which combines humor, suspense and violence, consists of six independent segments, many featuring Jewish characters and details taken from Szifron’s life. The final segment revolves around a Jewish wedding.
The film screened in prominent festivals, including Cannes, and even before getting the Oscar nomination, broke Argentine box-office records with more than 3.5 million tickets sold. The movie will be screened at the Sundance festival, which opened this week, and will be released in the United States on Feb. 20.
Szifron’s film career started in 2003 with “El Fondo del Mar” (The Bottom of the Sea), which starred the Jewish Uruguayan actor Daniel Hendler.
Szifron, 39, had already established himself as a popular TV writer/director before entering the film world. His series “Los Simuladores” (The Pretenders) in 2002 won the Argentine equivalent of the Emmy, and featured Jewish characters based on real people from the small Jewish community center, Bet Am del Oeste, which serves a middle-class Jewish population in the western section of Greater Buenos Aires.
Szifron has said he would like to make a film about how his grandfather escaped the Nazis by jumping from a concentration camp-bound train.