LOST EMBRACE -- Argentina's 2004 Academy Award entry for Best Foreign Language Film -- won the Grand Jury Award at the Berlin Film Festival.  Daniel Hendler, who plays Ariel Menaker in this film, won the Best Actor Award in Berlin for this winning performance.

LOST EMBRACE is a bittersweet look at national, personal and religious identity, set in a shabby Buenos Aires mall.  An amusingly diverse group of merchants, exiles, refugees and oddballs act as backdrop for the story of Ariel, a man adrift in stunted adolescence, who works in his mother's lingerie shop, and wants to get a Polish passport so he can go to Europe to seek his immigrant roots and start a new life.  More than that, however, he wants the answer to why his father left the family when Ariel was a baby and went to Israel to fight in the 1972 Yom Kippur War and never returned.  He learns that his repressed anger at being abandoned conceals a great need to recapture his father's "lost embrace."

LOST EMBRACE conjures up an ensemble of engaging characters who pursue their humble dreams with gentle humor, irresistible passion and an infectious generosity of spirit.  The tenderness of the family drama at its center, and the deep, hard-to-articulate feelings of a son for his enigmatic father and his heroically patient mother, emerge with a charming haphazardness.  The sly artfulness is apparent only in retrospect.  This is a small movie about a small world, but its modesty is part of what makes it durable and satisfying.

Language:  Spanish with English Sub-Titles
Running Time:  99 MINUTES