The Face of the Jellyfish. 2022. Argentina. Directed by Melisa Liebenthal. North American Premiere. In Spanish, Italian, German, Russian; English subtitles. 75 min.
A wryly comic examination of the meaning of human identity, Melisa Liebenthal’s film follows Marina (Rocío Stellato), a woman in her early thirties who has been stricken with a strange malady: her face has changed. From this simple premise, the director asks how much of our selves and personhood are connected to what we look like, and how difficult it would be simply to start over. Rather than constructing a Kafkaesque dreamscape, Liebenthal grounds Marina’s experiences in the everyday, then expands out to inquire how human individuated identity compares with that of the animal kingdom, incorporating footage of mammals, reptiles, birds, and aquatic species.