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Chronicles of a Wandering Saint: A Miraculous Debut from an Emerging Argentine Filmmaker

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Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, the remarkable debut feature film from writer-director Tomás Gómez Bustillo, opens with a prayer. The woman whispering it is Rita (Mónica Villa), the elderly custodian at a rural Argentine church. As she kneels in the first pew, clutching her rosary beads, white sunlight spills in through an open door, illuminating her like a Renaissance painting.

Later, Rita overhears a couple of her church frenemies, who stumbled upon her as she prayed, cast doubt over the authenticity of the scene. “You think the light just happened to hit her that way?” one woman mutters behind a closed door. It’s a ridiculous accusation—except for the fact that it’s true. When the sunlight illuminating her started to migrate, Rita paused mid-prayer, shimmied to her left to catch it, and resumed just in time for her onlookers to arrive.

Miracles that require a bit of manufacturing are a recurring theme in Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, a delightful, moving tale about one woman’s obsession with living—and appearing to live—as piously as possible.

Rita is constantly cleaning and praying, but she can’t secure the attention she wants from her church’s flighty priest (Pablo Moseinco), who is always running late for his next service. That is until, rummaging through the church’s storage room one day, she finds her lottery ticket of sorts: a statue of Santa Rita, the namesake of both Rita and her small village, which has supposedly been missing for decades. It might be a miracle.

Rita enlists the help of her doting husband Norberto (an easy to love Horacio Marassi), but he forgets to bring the car, leading to an amusing sequence where the couple walks home under the sweltering sun, the boxed statue hoisted onto their shoulders. At home, looking to revive a spark in their relationship, Norberto dusts off the yellow raincoats they wore on their honeymoon to Iguazú Falls, and suggests they visit the grandiose waterfalls again. Rita shrugs him off and reminds him that the waterfalls are exactly the same. “But we’re not,” he quips back.



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