On the day this year’s World Cup kicks off, June 11th, with Mexico x South Africa, a documentary debuts in cinemas that shows a Buenos Aires different from the one known worldwide.
Not with another look at the capital of Argentina. It’s really another Buenos Aires. The city of Buenos Aires is located in the interior of Pernambuco, about 80 km from Recife, in the Zona da Mata of the northeastern state.
“BuenosAires”, produced and directed by Tuca Siqueira, who became a regular in the city in order to get to know and understand it in order to script it, does not have football as its sole focus, but it is significantly present in the daily lives of the population of 13 thousand inhabitants.
In this “landscape film”, as defined by the director, which has narration in Spanish (with subtitles in Portuguese) by a teacher who teaches the language spoken in Argentina in Buenos Aires, Pernambuco, the population, at least part of it, identifies with Argentina.
In commerce, the shirts of the team led by Lionel Messi appear in a similar number to those of the Brazilian team. Across the city, people usually wear blue and white vertical stripes. There was such veneration for those who gave their son the name Lionel.
An unsuspecting visitor arriving in the city may, rightly so, not understand anything, and the film fails to explain – perhaps through a historian – why the town, which was once called Jacu (a bird), has been Buenos Aires since 1928. This context is missing.
The fact is that the people there get along well with the gentile Buenos Aires people, and many really like this link with their famous namesake.
An example of the connection: the empanada, a savory snack widely consumed in Argentina, is present in the daily diet of Buenos Aires de Pernambuco.
On the days of the Albiceleste team’s games in the World Cup, many of the inhabitants will gather in their homes, in bars or community spaces to fervently support the current world champion, as happened, as shown by “BuenosAires”, at the World Cup in Qatar, at the end of 2022.
As the film talks about universes that somehow try to get closer — or, at least, as Pernambuco’s Buenos Aires tries to resemble another Buenos Aires, Argentina’s —, there is a spirit of the World Cup that runs through the film
The taste for Argentine football goes beyond the field and the team.
There is a club in the city called Boca Junior, almost the namesake of Boca Juniors, one of the two biggest teams in Argentina. The uniform is very similar. The difference is that the “stars”, 100% Brazilian, play on the court and practice futsal.
One of the documentary’s highlights is precisely an “international” regional final: Boca Junior x Peñarol. The Outeiro district, in the city itself, has a team in honor of the Uruguayan giant.
The “game of the year”, with “the awarding of trophies and medals”, is announced on a sound car through the quiet alleys of the small “Argentine” town at 7 pm on December 3rd.
The fans, in the precarious stands of the cramped Vila São Luís gym, have their favorite.
But do the “Porteño Brazilians” of Boca Junior, led by Zé Paulo (founder, president, coach, physical trainer and team player) and with a player similar to Everton Cebolinha, have the football (or rather, futsal) to overcome opponents with “Uruguayan blood”?
With meat or chicken empanadas sold in fluent Spanish by a street vendor for R$3, an announcer with a pro-Boca northeastern accent and a rivalry worthy of the Libertadores, this is the final of the World Cup in Buenos Aires.
Not the one in 1978, Argentina 3 x 1 Netherlands. Other. Brazilian style.
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