A film by Matías Ferreyra

Produced by Sofía Castells (Vega Cine), Inés Barrionuevo (Gualicho Cine), Martín Paolorossi (Gualicho Cine)

Drama / 2025 / Argentina / Completed

Language: Spanish

Subtitles: English, French

P&A

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Presskit

Official selections

Cinélatino – FIPRESCI prize (France)

BAFICI – Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (Argentina) 

FICCI – Cartagena Film Festival (Colombia)

Synopsis

Argentina, 2001. In the midst of the economic crisis, Manuel and his family have to move to his maternal grandmother’s house. Caught in the middle of a strange war over the occupation of spaces, Manuel finds, in complicity with his grandmother, a particular and unexpected way of resisting.

“The film is a distrustful portrait of a family in crisis from a child’s point of view; a crisis that is also the one the country went through in 2001 when I was twelve years old. Suddenly, in today’s Argentina, the story takes on a curious validity and reflects a certain cyclical logic of our history with crises.”

Director’s note long

“The end of the 90’s was a time of strong changes for Argentina. The country went through a deep economic and social crisis that radically transformed it. My family, like so many others, experienced its own collapse. I was six years old when my parents decided to move into my maternal grandmother’s house. Life there wasn’t easy. I always felt a bit different from my siblings. I struggled to make friends, and when it came to playtime, I faced challenges: the “boys’ games” didn’t appeal to me, and the “girls’ games” were forbidden. Perhaps these were the reasons that brought me closer to my grandmother, a lonely and eccentric woman, who believed she was being spied on by people no one saw.

At home, unemployment, crowding and my grandmother’s particular mental life made living together hostile, but for me, her presence in the house made life more interesting. Getting close to her delusions, fantasizing about death or playing at being someone else, were ways to find a place of my own. “Madness is contagious” my parents used to say. I remember them making a great effort to draw boundaries that would “save” us from our grandmother’s madness, but affection and shared time will always blur them. I am interested in constructing the film from these deviations that show the fragility of the family structure, and the invisible loyalties that bind its individuals. In the film “the particular” is presented as a trench from which to resist.

Today, when I remember those years, I see myself battling to fit in. This meant leaving behind some of the children I was. They are the ones who tell me, little by little, this story. A House with Two Dogs is an auteur film, in the code of a psychological drama. It portrays the transformation of a rapidly crumbling family universe, just like the Argentina of those years. The story unfolds through the eyes of Manuel, one of the children, whose perspective is shaped by a profound sense of not belonging. In the house, unspoken rules, mandates, and compulsory heterosexuality dictate daily life. The narrative builds on the tension between what is silently imposed and what emerges as a response.”

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