The Practice - Filmmaker in person

With an understated spiritual questioning, The Practice returns to the searching narrative shared by all of Rejtman’s fiction films, now with a portrait of an Argentine yoga teacher, Gustavo (Esteban Bigliardi), living and working in Chile while navigating his divorce and what seems to be a new accident- and injury-prone stage of his life. The series of poignantly comic displacements stoically suffered by Gustavo thus resonate as emblems of a deeper quest as he is faced not only with his floating status as a newly single foreigner but also a serious muscle injury and, equally grave, the anxious attention of his overbearing mother. Gustavo’s suddenly unbalanced posture is, however, gently mirrored in the pratfalls and mishaps of the other yoga-practicing characters who together comprise a community of searchers and stumblers. The more personal, intimate inflection of Rejtman’s latest work is signaled by its partially autobiographical inspiration in the filmmaker’s own decades-long practice of Ashtanga yoga (including in a Chilean retreat) and his uncanny physical resemblance to the film’s lead, veteran Argentine stage and screen actor Bigliardi.