Lighter than Air (Más liviano que el aire)

A 93-year-old woman kidnaps the teenager who attempts to mug her and imposes an unusual penance: he must listen to her past. Between confessions, memories, and manipulation, an intimate duel unfolds about loneliness, morality, and the human need to be heard.

Faila, a 93-year-old woman, is assaulted at the entrance of her building by Santi, a 14-year-old boy. He threatens her with what she believes is a knife, but he does not imagine that Faila is an extremely cunning woman. The elderly woman leads him to her apartment under the pretext of giving him her money, locks him in the bathroom, and instead of releasing him, imposes a condition: he will only come out once she finishes telling him the story of her mother, Delita—her life and her death.

From that moment on, Faila begins the tale of her mother, Delita, a high-society woman who in 1916 was obsessed with learning to fly an airplane. To achieve her dream, Delita accepts a deal with the aviator Arnold (whose real name was José): he would give her flying lessons in exchange for spending a night with her. After a brutal encounter, Arnold tries to back out of the deal the following day. Desperate, Delita shoots him with a revolver, gravely wounding him; then, after forcing him to give her instructions, she manages to take off in the Farman. However, during the landing, the plane crashes and Delita dies instantly. Arnold also dies, and the official version becomes a simple accident—an incident that leaves the young Faila orphaned.

The conversation continues between Faila and Santi, separated by a door. Faila confesses a life marked by abuse and a deep mistrust of men, while Santi reveals that he lives in extreme poverty and that his motivation for stealing was to gather money to “rescue” one of his sisters, with whom he maintains a relationship that Faila describes as incestuous and sick. This confession is crucial: it convinces Faila that she cannot release Santi, whom she now sees as a danger to himself and to his sister. His captivity ceases to be a whim and becomes a “redemptive” mission. Faila uses food as a bargaining chip, and Santi oscillates between submission and rebellion, at one point destroying the only photographs Faila treasures of her family.

On the fourth day of the kidnapping, Faila falls in the kitchen, fractures her hip, and in the fall leaves the gas knob turned open. After an agonizing struggle, she manages to crawl close enough to shut it off, saving them both from asphyxiation. However, when Santi responds with insults from the bathroom, Faila—reaffirmed in her idea of “salvation”—decides to reopen the gas deliberately, rationalizing this act as a gesture of mercy that will free Santi from a future of sin and crime.

RELEVANT INFORMATION: Federico Jeanmaire (Buenos Aires, 1957) is one of the most original voices in contemporary Argentine literature. A philologist and Cervantes expert, he blends humor, irony, and moral reflection in novels that explore loneliness, identity, and social violence. He won the Clarín Novel Prize for Más liviano que el aire and the Unicaja Fernando Quiñones Prize. His work, translated into several languages, stands out for its lucid, provocative, and deeply human voice.

Más liviano que el aire has enormous audiovisual potential thanks to its psychological tension, its contained structure, and the intensity of its two sole characters. The apartment where almost all the action takes place functions as a true emotional pressure chamber, ideal for an intimate thriller or a psychological drama. The relationship between Faila and Santi offers a powerful interaction between characters, capable of sustaining a visually minimalist yet emotionally explosive story, where themes of power, guilt, redemption, and loneliness resonate strongly.

AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Film, TV Film.

AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish, Arabic, Greek, Italian, French.