A man appears one morning in a Buenos Aires psychiatric ward, standing among the other patients as if he has always been there. No one admitted him. No file exists. He says he is not from here at all, and he means it more literally than any patient before him.

MAN FACING SOUTHEAST (1987) follows Dr. Julio Denis (Lorenzo Quinteros), a psychiatrist assigned to this new arrival. Rantes (Hugo Soto) claims to be an extraterrestrial sent to observe the human race. He spends his days standing in the courtyard facing southeast, toward, he says, the place he comes from. Rantes is calm, articulate, and unnervingly perceptive about the cruelty people inflict on one another.

Denis is supposed to treat him according to hospital procedure, medicate him, correct him, bring him back to consensus reality. Instead the doctor finds his own unhappiness mirrored and sharpened by his patient's clarity. The question the film asks is whether Rantes is delusional, or simply too honest for the institution around him.

Directed and written by Eliseo Subiela, the film became one of Argentina's most internationally recognized works, admired for using science fiction as a lens for questions of sanity, empathy, and institutional cruelty rather than spectacle.