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Man Facing Southeast: An Alien Perspective on Humanity’s Madness
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Man Facing Southeast: An Alien Perspective on Humanity’s Madness
A lovely Argentinian arthouse film from the ’80s that deserves to be better known.
By Kali Wallace
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Published on February 4, 2026
Credit: Cinequanon Pictures
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Credit: Cinequanon Pictures
Man Facing Southeast (Spanish: Hombre mirando al sudeste) (1986) Written and directed by Eliseo Subiela. Starring Lorenzo Quinteros, Hugo Soto, and Inés Vernengo.
Two men sit across from each other in an office. One of them, a younger man with a healing wound on his head, explains in great earnestness how a suicide pact with his girlfriend went wrong. They planned to die together, he insists. But it went wrong. They only had four bullets. He couldn’t die with her.
A psychiatrist listens to the man’s rambling confession, but his mind is wandering. He thinks about playing the saxophone. He thinks about Rene Magritte’s painting The Lovers II and imagines blood seeping from beneath the white cloths. He thinks about how the man before him needs a priest, not a doctor, and he won’t be able to help. He’ll give the man medication, drug him into a stupor, and watch him fade like all the other patients.
As the man keeps talking, telling his story over and over again, the doctor thinks, “Welcome to hell.”
That’s the opening scene of Eliseo Subiela’s Man Facing Southeast (Hombre mirando al sudeste), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 1986. The film was released in theaters in Argentina in 1987 and became a modest but respectable success, and it went international with a VHS release later that year. Man Facing Southeast was Subiela’s second feature film and far from his last; he would go on making odd, slightly fantastical, very artsy films until his death in 2016.
Here we run into a problem. I know I sometimes make mistakes in researching for these articles, but I do genuinely try to find decent sources for all the information I include within the time I have available (i.e., less than a week). Sometimes there is so much information it’s hard to take in everything. And sometimes there is so little that I feel silly claiming to know anything at all.
This is definitely one of the latter times. It’s not that I was expecting to find an abundance of easily accessible information about Subiela and his film. We’re talking about an arthouse film from Argentina in the ’80s, and I don’t know Spanish, which greatly limits my research. And it’s not that there’s nothing out there. It’s just that most English-language articles that mention Man Facing Southeast aren’t about the movie at all; they are about the American movies accused of plagiarizing it. We’ll get to that in a bit.
Many sources report that Man Facing Southeast won an award at TIFF in 1986, but different articles say it was the People’s Choice Award (it wasn’t), or the Audience Award (which doesn’t exist), or the Critic’s Award (which is closer but not quite right), and others don’t bother to specify. The film is not listed on the TIFF website, which made me wonder if everybody was just repeating incorrect information. That’s not the case—it turns out that’s because the listing of the award Man Facing Southeast actually did win is incomplete.
The Los Angeles Times write-up of TIFF from September 21, 1986, says, “Every festival has a ‘buzz’ film, one you can hear about in the movie lines and in the press rooms. This one was ‘Hombre Mirando al Sudeste,’ a haunting evocative 1986 work by Eliseo Subiela, little known outside Argentina, which came out of the Latin American program to win the International Critics’ Award.”
At this point in my research I was very proud of myself for verifying one (1) fact.
Let’s go back to the beginning, by which I mean the beginning of Eliseo Subiela’s film career. I’ve only been able to find one in-depth interview with Subiela that has been translated into English, and that’s in a 2007 article in the academic journal Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche. That’s where I got a lot of information about his life, even though, like most film directors, he has a tendency to self-mythologize in how he describes his experiences.
Here is another scene to imagine: It’s the early 1960s in Buenos Aires. A seventeen-year-old boy is walking through the city carrying a brand new Bell and Howell 8mm film camera, which his father gave to him when he developed an interest in movies. He has a particular destination in mind, but he isn’t quite sure where it’s located, so he loiters around Plaza Constitución, watching the people pass through the square.
He’s looking for a particular kind of person, and he finally finds them in the form of a “little old lady carrying a bag.” She leads him to where he wants to go, which is up to the gates of El Borda, or Hospital Interdisciplinario Psicoasistencial José Tiburcio Borda, a large psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires. That’s where the boy wants to make his first movie.
I looked it up: the square and the hospital are about a 15-minute walk apart, so Subiela’s story about how he embarked upon his first project is at least plausible. That first film is a 17-minute documentary called The Long Silence (Un largo silencio) (1963) about life in El Borda. Subiela spent several months visiting the hospital, writing the script, filming and editing. In 1965 The Long Silence won the top prize at the Viña Del Mar Film Festival in Chile. Subiela, then twenty years old, was pleased with his short film’s success: “After expenses, I cleared $200, which in Argentina was quite a bit. The cost of the movie had been $100.”
Subiela grew up in a tremendously tumultuous time in Argentina (the rise and fall of Juan Perón as president, the multiple coups d’état that followed), and his father’s ill health meant life at home was also stressful. He spent his teen years escaping to the cinema as much as he could, and it was there he fell in love with the avant-garde films of the French New Wave, as well as the neorealist work of Polish director Andrzej Wajda.
But it would be a couple of decades before Subiela would start making his own feature films. Through the rest of the ’60s and ’70s, he worked on a few other projects, made commercials, drank too much, suffered some mental health problems, and traveled the world. He contributed a chapter of the film Argentina, May 1969: The Roads to Liberation! (Argentina, mayo de 1969: Los caminos de la liberación) (1969), but eventually drifted away from the cadre of Argentinian filmmakers active in militant and revolutionary groups. His reason: “I grew apart from those militant groups when I found out a lot of it had to do with fighting and killing.”
Subiela released his first feature film The Conquest of Paradise (La conquista del paraíso) in 1981, and only after that did he return to both the idea and the location of his very first film. He went back to Hospital Borda—which has been in operation since 1865 and still is today—specifically to revisit what had drawn him there when he was a teenager. He would later say that it took him twenty-two years to realize that A Long Silence was a rough cut of what would become Man Facing Southeast.
That’s how we find ourselves in the opening scene described above. Dr. Julio Denis (Lorenzo Quinteros) is a psychiatrist at Hospital Borda, but he doesn’t believe in his work anymore. He’s burned out, depressed, and lonely; he spends his free time drinking and playing saxophone and listlessly entertaining his kids as a divorced weekend dad. He doesn’t worry too much when an extra, unidentified person appears in his hospital ward. He thinks the newcomer, Rantés (Hugo Soto), has come to the hospital to hide away from the world. His primary concern is that Rantés has no apparent identification or connections; he wants to find out who this patient is so he can treat him.
Julio is amused but not overly worried when Rantés claims to be an alien from outer space, come to Earth to observe an advanced sort of hologram to study humans. Julio believes Rantés got the hologram idea from the novel The Invention of Morel by Argentinian author Adolfo Bioy Casares; from that and other details, the doctor concludes that Rantés is likely an intelligent, well-educated, but troubled and delusional man. That’s enough to get him curious, and he finds himself engaged in a patient’s care for the first time in a while. The two men become friends, in a way, or at least as much as they can when one is convinced the other has no grip on reality. Both actors are fantastic in their roles, and their fond chemistry, even when they are disagreeing, carries the movie all the way through.
There’s a constant push and pull between them: Julio is trying to find cracks in Rantés’ delusions, and Rantés is trying to get Julio to help him understand the passionate, emotional nature of humanity. Rantés even gets some work studying human brains in a medical laboratory, which seems like maybe the sort of job that should not be given to unidentified psychiatric patients. He hasn’t come to Earth alone, he says, but other alien agents have succumbed to the lure of human emotions and gone astray from their mission. We’re later introduced to Beatriz (Inés Vernengo), who at first claims to be a friend Rantés made outside the hospital, but later claims to be one of those wayward alien visitors. (One film writer has suggested that Beatriz’s surname, Dick, is a reference to Philip K. Dick and particularly his 1982 novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which I have not read.)
Even though the question of whether Rantés is an alien or a delusional human is the backbone of the entire film, the movie isn’t really interested in answering it. There are scenes where Rantés demonstrates telekinetic powers—using them to help feed a hungry family in a diner, for example—but these scenes are framed from his point of view, not from the perspective of Julio or another observer.
The movie builds up, in its leisurely, meandering way, to an inevitable breaking point. Julio, Rantés, and Beatriz go to an orchestral performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. During “Ode to Joy,” Rantés and Beatriz get up to dance, motivating others in the audience to do the same. Then Rantés interrupts the performance to take over as conductor.
At the same time, the patients at the hospital react as though they too are in the audience and feeling the same infectious joy. They run and dance through the hospital in a crowd far too exuberant to qualify as a riot.
In the aftermath, the police are called, Rantés is arrested, and the head of the hospital demands that Julio finally start taking his patient’s treatment seriously. Rantés is given the antipsychotic haloperidol, and he becomes depressed, angry, agitated, and eventually catatonic before he finally dies. It’s a sad ending, but also an inevitable one, and it leaves Julio without any certain answers about his patient and friend.
This is not a film that is much interested in explaining itself, and I like that about it. It does not try to explain the truth underlying the story, nor give us any wink-nudge hints as to what we’re supposed to think. When Julio contemplates a torn photo of Rantés and Beatriz, he thinks about how it could be proof they are human friends or siblings suffering from folie à deux, but the missing half of the photograph means there is always going to be part of the story that he can’t know. This is a movie that wants to pose questions, not provide answers, and that’s underlined in every conversation Rantés and Julio have and the way they are constantly dancing around thoughts that are hard to pin down. How do we define sane and insane? Where does human emotion come from? Why are humans so consistently our own worst enemies? What’s the difference between perception and reality?
It’s not that we, as viewers, can’t answer these questions; it’s just that the movie is not giving us gold stars for being convinced we have the right answers. Is Rantés crazy? Or an alien? Or even a Christ allegory? Yes. No. All of the above and none of the above. The film is asking us to think about it, the same way Rantés is asking Julio to think about it.
That brings us to the necessary Hollywood footnote, which is the question of whether Iain Softley’s 2001 film K-PAX, based on the 1995 novel of the same name by Gene Brewer, is a shameless rip-off of Man Facing Southeast.
First, a note: K-PAX was, in fact, the second time people looked at an American movie and saw Man Facing Southeast. The first time was the film Mr. Jones (1993), directed by Mike Figgis, which features a scene in which a psychiatric patient played by Richard Gere jumps on stage to conduct a Beethoven concert. Some articles claim that this scene is an acknowledged homage, but Subiela was pretty clear that nobody asked his permission or offered credit for the inspiration.
The comparison to K-PAX goes beyond a single scene, however, and it’s one both viewers and film critics were making before K-PAX was even released. In 2001, Roger Ebert noted in his column that he was receiving numerous letters about the similarities. Subiela did pursue legal action but eventually stopped due to lack of funds; the matter was unresolved before his death in 2016. Brewer and Softley have always denied they were aware of Man Facing Southeast. But it doesn’t seem to have mattered, as a lot of film critics and cinephiles seem to take it as fact that K-PAX was based on Man Facing Southeast.
I haven’t seen K-PAX, I’ve only watched the trailer, which is the sort of schmaltzy early ’00s movie trailer that could be tailormade to put me, personally, off ever wanting to see the movie. So I do not have an informed contribution to this debate. I only bring it up to acknowledge that, yes, the question is out there, and it’s unresolved, and it’s likely to remain that way.
What I will say is that it’s unfortunate that Man Facing Southeast is often remembered only as the movie that may or may not have inspired another movie, because it’s a lovely movie in itself. It’s charming, perceptive, sad, and just weird enough. It wasn’t the first film to frame parallels between how we conceive of mental illness and a larger disillusionment with society, and it certainly wasn’t the last, but it’s touching and thoughtful, and I very much enjoyed its deceptive simplicity. Like the best sci fi and the best arthouse cinema, it is all about giving us space to contemplate what it means to be human.
What do you think of Man Facing Southeast? Or its legacy, however disputed, in films that followed?
I don’t recall who it was who suggested this movie in comments many months ago, but thank you for bringing it to my attention, whoever you are.
Next week: A decade earlier and across the ocean, another alien came for a visit in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Find streaming sources.[end-mark]
The post <i>Man Facing Southeast</i>: An Alien Perspective on Humanity’s Madness appeared first on Reactor.
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