Alberto Laiseca's Doc at the National Library in Buenos Aires

Alberto Laiseca

More than twenty years after it was made, the work Alberto Laiseca and I created together is receiving a new moment of recognition. My documentary Deliciosas Perversiones Polimorfas will be screened at the Auditorio Jorge Luis Borges of the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno in Buenos Aires, as part of the exhibition “Laiseca, el iniciado.”

For any Argentine writer—or filmmaker—the National Library is not just another venue. It is one of the central spaces where the country reflects on its literary memory. That this small film about Laiseca should now find a place there, two decades after it was made, feels both unexpected and deeply appropriate.

When I filmed Laiseca in the early 2000s, the intention was simple: to spend time with a writer whose imagination refused to stay within ordinary boundaries. Laiseca had a way of transforming the most mundane facts of his life into something mythic. His childhood village of Camilo Aldao could suddenly become a vast imaginary metropolis; a personal memory could unfold into metaphysical speculation or grotesque comedy. Listening to him speak was already a kind of literature.

The film does not attempt to explain Laiseca or analyze his work in academic terms. Instead, it captures him in conversation—reflecting on his life, his writing, his years working in the Argentine harvests, and the philosophy behind what he called “realismo delirante.” In Laiseca’s world, reality was never rejected; it was simply expanded until it revealed its strange and monstrous possibilities.

Over the years many of the subjects of my films have passed away. Laiseca is among them. What remains are the conversations we were fortunate enough to record. Watching the film now, after so much time has passed, I am reminded that documentaries often become something different from what we first imagined. What began as a portrait of a living writer gradually becomes a record of presence.

It is also worth noting that the film has never been translated into English. It will be screened in its original Spanish version, just as it was filmed more than two decades ago. In a way this feels right. Laiseca’s voice—full of digressions, humor, sudden philosophical turns, and invented worlds—belongs entirely to the rhythm of his language.

The exhibition “Laiseca, el iniciado” brings together manuscripts, documents, and other materials related to the writer’s life and imagination. Within that context, the film offers something different: the chance to encounter Laiseca himself, speaking freely and transforming memory into myth as he goes.

Time moves forward. Writers disappear. But sometimes a film survives long enough to meet its subject again, in another place and another moment. I am grateful that this one has been invited back into the conversation.