Luxbox Films has acquired the worldwide sales rights to Mariano Llinás’ epic five-and-a-half-hour documentary “The Life of Jorge Luis Borges,” which will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in the Open – Non-Fiction section.

The film is a biography of the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges, based on an exhaustive review of the writings he left, the books he read and the places he visited.

The film is also “an attempt to decipher a very peculiar life: someone who lived as a hidden and underground warrior, whose cause was literature, literature conceived as a kingdom and as a landscape,” according to a statement.

“If Cold War spies fought from their desks or from an uninhabited house to defend their half of the world, Borges struggled from a library to elevate and expand the territories of his own tribe: the people for whom the most important part of the universe are books, plots and words.”

Llinás is perhaps best known for 2018’s “La Flor,” which, ruling out experimental projects or mere cinematographic exercises, is the longest film in the history of cinema. Before that, “Balnearios” (2002) and “Historias Extraordinarias” (2008) had important presentations at festivals.

In 2003, together with Alejo Moguillansky, Agustín Mendilaharzu and Laura Citarella, he founded the group El Pampero Cine.

The producers of “The Life of Jorge Luis Borges” are Citarella, Ezequiel Pierr, Mendilaharzu, Moguillanksy and Llinás for El Pampero Cine.

Llinás is the scriptwriter. The DP is Mendilaharzu. The production designer is Ezequiel Pierri and the editor is Ignacio Codino. The music is by Gabriel Chwojnik.

The protagonists are Ernesto Montequín, Nicolás Helft, Laura Paredes, Milva Leonardi and Pablo Dacal.