Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine

On board a cruise ship in the seas off Patagonia, a crew member discovers a magical portal below deck leading to the apartment of a young woman in a South American city. At the same time, a group of men stumbles upon a concrete hut near their settlement in the Philippines, which frightens some of the villagers. Chico ventana también quisiera tener un submarino interweaves these two stories into a cinematographic labyrinth, in whose passageways and junctions people overlap and lose themselves just as their worlds do. Somewhere between dark engine rooms and middle-class living rooms, between the vastness of the sea and the dense tangle of the jungle, between more traditional and capitalist-modern ways of life, individuals meet and observe one another with curiosity, scepticism and anxiety. Alex Piperno is interested in precisely the moment just before the encounter – hesitant and on the threshold – and thus creates a cinema that is transitory through and through. (Berlinale)