Sightlines · reception
How La Flor was received
2019 · Mariano Llinás · La Flor on Sightlines
The arc
It premiered at Argentina's BAFICI festival in 2018, took the top prize, and was instantly framed less as a movie than an event; a few years on it's settled into legend status — the 14-hour film people plan whole weekends around rather than merely watch.
What’s debated
The eternal fight: is its enormous runtime a genuine artistic necessity or the ultimate cinephile endurance flex — and is it cheating to watch it in parts instead of one heroic sitting?
Its footprint
Finishing La Flor is a badge of honor — Letterboxd reviews read like summit logs, complete with timestamps, snack inventories, and 'day two' updates, and its hand-drawn flower diagram of the film's structure became its unofficial emblem.
Where it stands
A cult object of the streaming era's slow-cinema wing: the 'have you actually seen all of it?' film that separates the list-makers from the completists.
Did you know? Llinás shot the film over roughly a decade with the same four actresses — Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa and Laura Paredes of the Buenos Aires theater collective Piel de Lava — making it one of the longest fiction films ever given a theatrical release, at around 13 and a half hours.