"If you don't know what the South is, you're from the North." Made by Fernando Solanas as the companion piece to his aching portrait of exile, Tangos: The Exile of Gardel (SFIFF 1986), South charts the agony of a return to Argentina after years of imprisonment. It also marks a return home for the director of The Hour of the Furnaces: this is his first film shot in Argentina in over ten years... A man, imprisoned for subversive activities, is released after five years. Desperate to see his wife again, Floreal must first undergo a nocturnal reckoning with the past... Wandering the streets of Buenos Aires, exhilarated by his freedom, a series of images appear before him. These memories are sculpted like velvet dreams, where the sad melodies of the tango (hauntingly scored by Astor Piazzolla) waft around the fringes of dimly remembered incidents and people...evoking the history and the dreams of Argentina... Suggestive and sensual, the poetics of South make this film a deeply humanistic and probing portrait of the collective memory of modern Argentina, and indeed any country which has known repression. Piers Handling, Toronto