Atlas María is a short essay film about exploration, inheritance, and storytelling through the life of María, the filmmaker's great aunt and one of the first women explorers to the Amazon. While rooted in documentary material, the film also flirts with fantasy: both as a driving desire to discover the unknown and as a genre, suggesting that history itself is made of stories we like telling ourselves. Born in Argentina to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe, María’s life unfolded against the backdrop of twentieth-century dreams of exploration and development in South America. Moving between family memory and colonial history, the film examines how narratives of expeditions, settlement, and progress shape and are in turn reinterpreted by the lives that move through them.

Rather than offering a linear biography, the film unfolds as an atlas of traces. It invites us to an expedition through a wide range of visual and textual materials: fragments of archival and family footage, newly shot studio scenes and from a trip to the Amazon; photographs taken by María during her adventures and newly made documentation of indigenous artifacts (also from her travels); historical government documents, and even a Croatian comic where María features as the damsel in distress, pointing at the outrageous paths a person’s public persona can take, often imagined by others, and especially by men. The journey is deliberately erratic, following chance connections and intuitive leaps, mirroring the logic of historical expeditions themselves, which often responded more to coincidence, opportunity, and fantasy than to any heroic search for truth. In fact, the sex-appeal of the unknown is that its mystery cannot be revealed. 

A central thread in the film is a book written by Tibor Sekelj, María’s husband, whose account of their travels through South America mixes fact, fantasy, and colonial imagination. Passages from this book surface throughout the film as text and image, functioning as a counterpoint to the filmmaker’s attempt to reconstruct María’s perspective.

In a very personal and playful tone, the filmmaker jumps between these materials, speculating about hidden connections, gaps, and contradictions. The film is attentive not only to what is recorded, but also to what remains unsaid. Through these shifting layers, the film asks: what are the hidden forces that shape someone’s story? What roles do we play, even without our consent? What is decided by us, and what stories are told through us?