By Jay Kuehner

The sorrow of exile is built into the very architecture of A While at the Border, Ileana Dell’Unti’s epistolic portrait of two sisters whose lives are cleaved apart during the advent of the Argentine military dictatorship; one, Claudia, fleeing for Sweden (having escaped via Uruguay); the other, Julia, remaining in the north of Argentina. The kidnap and torture of the former, briefly alluded to in the film’s prologue, is the haunting factor in an otherwise mundane exposition – integral to the film’s contrapuntal formal design – of various public spaces that ‘backdrop’ an exchange of voiced letters between the sisters, now a world apart.