Cristina Zar's The Hours Between won Best Fiction at the eighth edition of Inte Cinema Festival — a film of small gestures and long silences that stayed with the jury and the Roman audience alike. We spoke with the Argentine director about restraint, about making work far from the industry's centres, and about the night her film played in Rome.
Congratulations. Did you expect it?
Not at all. The Hours Between is a very quiet film — nothing explodes, no one delivers a speech. I have entered it in places where I could feel it slipping past audiences who wanted more event, more incident. So to have it not only selected but understood, in Rome, by a room full of strangers — that was the surprise. The trophy was almost beside the point. The understanding was the thing.
The film is built on restraint. Was that always the plan?
It was the whole plan. The story is about the time between two events in a family — the waiting, not the events. If I had shot the events, it would have been a different, lesser film. The discipline was in trusting that the audience would lean into the quiet rather than checking out of it. Every instinct in commercial filmmaking tells you to fill the silence. I wanted to protect it.
Every instinct in commercial filmmaking tells you to fill the silence. I wanted to protect it.Cristina Zar
You work in Argentina, some distance from the festival centres of Europe and North America. How does that shape the work?
It shapes everything, some of it hard, some of it a gift. The hard part is access — to money, to equipment, and honestly to festivals, because so many of them cost money to enter, and those fees add up fast when you are converting from a currency that does not favour you. There are festivals I simply never applied to, not because my film did not belong but because the entry fee was a real decision against groceries. That is not an exaggeration.
Was that part of what drew you to Inte?
Completely. I will be very honest: from far away, most European festivals feel like closed doors — you assume the programme is decided before you ever apply, that a film from Argentina is a curiosity at best. Inte did not feel like that. It felt like a festival that actually wanted to be surprised by where a film came from. I sent it more in hope than expectation, and some months later I was in Rome watching it play. For a filmmaker working where I work, being genuinely considered — not filed under "international" and forgotten — is not a detail. It is everything.
Tell us about the screening itself.
I have shown the film in a few places now, but Rome was different, and I have tried to work out why. I think it is the city. The audience had come across Rome in the evening to sit in a dark room and watch short films by people they had never heard of. That is a serious act. They were not casual. And a quiet film needs a serious audience — it needs people willing to do the work of paying attention, because the film will not do that work for them. Rome gave me that audience.
And the conversation afterward?
That was the part I did not expect and will not forget. In the soirée after the screening, people did not ask the usual festival questions about budget and cameras. They talked about the silences — what they had felt in them, what they thought the film was withholding and why. Someone described a moment back to me in a way I had not consciously intended but recognised immediately as true. That is the rarest thing. An audience showing you your own film.
What is next for you?
Another feature-length script, slower than is probably wise. But Rome did something for my confidence that is hard to measure. Knowing that the quiet film found its people — that there is a room somewhere that wanted exactly what I made — you carry that into the next project. It makes you braver about the silences.
Any advice for filmmakers thinking of submitting?
Send the film you actually made, not the one you think festivals want. And do not talk yourself out of applying somewhere because you assume it is not for people like you, from places like yours. Apply anyway. One festival that took my quiet Argentine short seriously changed my whole year.
The 9th Edition of Inte Cinema Festival is open for submissions on FilmFreeway.
Inte Cinema Festival is an independent short film festival and cultural association based in Rome. Submissions for the 9th Edition are open now on FilmFreeway.