Venice Review: Mariano Llinás’ Life of Jorge Luis Borges Is a Thorough, Innovative View of a Literary Genius 

And so El Pampero Cine finally reach Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentine experimental film collective—comprising Mariano Llinás, Laura Citarella, Agustín Mendilaharzu, and Alejo Moguillanksy—are a natural outgrowth of the Latin American literary tradition of Borges, Bolaño and Cortazar, making Llinás’ Venice world premiere Life of Jorge Luis Borges is a perhaps-inevitable tribute to their greatest artistic forefather. 

Except this team were never going to give you the tidy CliffNotes version or, heaven forbid, an AI overview. Settling in for an El Pampero Cine film often means cordoning off at least two blocks of feature-viewing time, with many branching idiosyncratic digressions in store, and Llinás duly provides five-and-a-half hours of literary gamesmanship and sleuthing that still amount to a highly informative account of the pioneering 20th-century writer. It’s always tempting to do some homework when a great director tackles an equally important literary work; the ultimate cinephile challenge on that front could be Raúl Ruiz’s 1999 film Time Regained, his adaptation of the final volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, itself often counted as the longest novel ever written. Borges, by contrast, never wrote a novel, preferring to compose a concise array of short stories, polemical essays, and fragments that are easily available in excellent translated editions. With The Library of Babel, The Garden of Forking Paths, and The Aleph et al in your mind, Llinás actually swerves from the grand textual analysis you might expect, instead going for reams of biographical contextualization that still puts the onus on us to piece together connections and linkages, if we wish to. 

When a canonical and controversial writer passes, as Borges did in 1986, attention turns to their afterlife: the estate’s provisions, tributes and eulogies, and hopefully the publication of an exhaustive biography. But this is usually no solemn and dry procedure. Literary biography is prime domain for gossip-hounds; these luminaries simply met so many important people, developed enough testy feuds, and faced such scrutiny and jealousy from their enemies that their lives become a provocative meta-text over their own textual output. Whilst many post-facto reflections on Borges have been published, most notably from his closest associates in life such as his colleague Adolfo Bioy Casares, practically all Llinás and his team must do to generate an interesting film is show up at two different archival libraries—in New York and Austin, Texas—turn the containers of material upside down, and essentially “riff” on the various points of interest they notice. 

Llinás’ main co-conspirator here is the translator and scholar Ernesto Montequín, a world authority on Borges, and—with a visual motif of a large, precise magnifying glass introduced early on—the Dr. Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. (Another comparison that came to me, with all the long, cross-country motorway journeys they take, were the bickering, joshing duo of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip.) Every piece of Borges ephemera—whether it’s a handwritten manuscript teeming with alternate lines in brackets, a treasured book from his collection with scrawled annotations, or letter correspondence with intimates—complicates the picture and provides fresh avenues for interpreting stories that are easy enough to follow but evoke mystery as we question what on earth could have inspired them. Borges’ offcuts, drafts, and doodles have a particular relevance to being a Borges reader when the final texts, with their parallel dimensions and hypothetical pathways, resemble them so much.

This factor is also why Llinás’ in-person tracing of Borges’ physical footprint—spanning residences in cosmopolitan Buenos Aires to the lower Pampas, Uruguay, and Geneva; key professional obligations in Reykjavík and Austin; and the locations where incidents from the stories take place—feels anything but a doddery indulgence. To be a dedicated reader of Borges is, again, not to be perplexed, but share in his narrators’ contemplation of enigmas and paradoxes, observing how literary imagination can transcend and remake the world, and ultimately contribute to our understanding of it (there’s a key analogue for his encyclopedic and encompassing thinking in the expanse of the Internet, not to mention generative AI). Merely looking at and filming his old haunts, which give Montequín the chance to expound off the top of his head, give the sense—or the illusion—of reducing proximity to the overall mystery. 

Llinás has created one of the most convincing and most enjoyable literary films in recent memory, refusing the reductiveness we typically see in hagiographic documentaries whose goal is only to be in thrall to their chosen subject. It achieves this by forswearing objectivity, privileging Llinás’ and his collective’s authorship so they can rephrase Borges and his life in their own words. 

Life of Jorge Luis Borges premiered at the 2026 Venice International Film Festival.