Ariel Menaker (Daniel Hendler) resides in a small Jewish community in Buenos Aires. This 27-year-old college dropout is experiencing a transition in his life that both baffles and intrigues him. His pregnant ex-girlfriend Estela (Melina Petriella) has decided to have the child on her own without his help. Ariel regularly flirts with Rita (Silvina Bosco), a sexy and hedonistic young woman who manages an Internet café in the run-down shopping mall where he works in his mother's (Adriana Aizenberg) lingerie store.
Ariel dreams of getting a Polish passport so he can take off for Europe and create a new life for himself. Only trouble is, he really doesn't have one final piece of his personal puzzle in place. His father, Elias (Jorge D'Elia), left Argentina to fight for Israel in the Yom Kipper War and never returned. Some of the elders who work in the mall have told him stories about his father but not enough to give him a clear picture of him. His father's absence has left a hole in Ariel's soul but it hasn't affected his older brother, Joseph (Sergio Boris), that much. He has an export-import business and constantly comes up with new entrepreneurial schemes. The only person in Ariel's circle of acquaintances who seems to be moving into a better future is a local rabbi (Norman Erlich) who has been chosen to lead a synagogue in Florida.
Lost Embrace is Argentina's 2004 entry in the Academy Awards for the Best Foreign Language Film. It won the Grand Jury Award at the Berlin Film Festival. Director Daniel Burman has fashioned a detailed and engaging portrait of Ariel's quest to establish a new life for himself. He is lucky to have been exposed to such a diverse community in the mall including a stationer (Isaac Fain) whose business is bad; an Italian (Aitilio Pozzobon) and his family who run an electronics emporium; a young Korean couple (Catalina Cho and Pablo Kim) who dispense Feng Shui products and advice in their small shop; and Ramon (Juan Jose Flores Quispe), a Peruvian laborer who does odd jobs for people. All of them are struggling in hard economic times to keep their heads above water.
Ariel does learn a little more about his family from his Polish emigrant grandmother (Rosita Londner), but the real breakthrough comes when his father returns to Argentina for a visit. At last, this anxious and uneasy young man learns the truth about the past and is ready to decide which option to pursue in the future. If it takes a village to raise a child, Lost Embrace goes one step further and states that we need all the help we can get from the communities where we live and work when it comes to shoring up our identity and making meaning in our lives.
