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LA COMARCA

THE SHIRE

By Juan Manuel BUGARÍN

COOPERATIVA MENTAL - as PROD

Documentary - Development 2024

In 1982, the director of a psychiatric hospital and a Mapuche shaman join forces to provide new solutions to their patients. But treatments are too experimental for the inhabitants of the region and the hospital splits up. Today, the empty spaces of that hospital are no longer a fond memory.

- Year of production
- 2024
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- ARGENTINA
- Languages
- SPANISH-ARGENTINE, MAPUCHE
- Budget
- 0.3 - 0.6 M$
- Director(s)
- Juan Manuel BUGARÍN
- Synopsis
- In the Viedma-Patagones region there are mysterious presences. Some say they have seen their ancestors wandering around the town, others saw mythological vermin hidden in the hills. In the river, they say, a city of Mapuche souls rests in the depths.
  Contact with another dimension seems to be daily in the region.
  
  Enclosed in a nursing home, Cesar says that 40 years ago a
  snake attacked him. From that moment on, he was never the same, "evil" took over him.
  His memory calls to the ghosts of the place: Arturo Philip and Dominga Ñancufil, a psychiatrist and a Mapuche shaman, joined forces to give Cesar a solution and ended up giving him a shelter.
  Together they carried out an innovative treatment of psychiatric patients at the Carmen de Patagones Hospital where madness, magic, art and science coexisted for a few years.
  However, other inhabitants of the region remember the dark areas within the hospital: Irma was a patient who longed to start a family but lived in psychiatric institutions all her life. Her pregnancy inside the hospital was a break in the community. Some opposed and others defended Irma's intention to become a mother. Among the latter were Dominga and Arturo. These leaders of their respective communities became personae non gratae, abusers or devils, depending on who call them.
  
  A complaint ends the experience, everyone is expelled, and the hospital closes its doors.
  Forty years later, that small hospital and its crumbling corridors nourish a story that wanders through the streets of the region making its inhabitants uncomfortable. For some, it was a mystical experience, an experience of discovery and learning. For others, a trauma that is best buried.