The Mural of Siqueiros

In the 1930s, renowned Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros travels to Argentina to deliver a series of lectures and create a mural with a revolutionary theme, which encounters political opposition locally. Natalio Botana, a press tycoon and close friend of the nation’s President Agustín P. Justo, invites Siqueiros to contribute to the cultural section of his newspaper, Critica, and to paint a mural in the basement of his estate, Villa Los Granados. Siqueiros agrees, and his wife, poet Blanca Luz Brum, joins him. Her arrival and subsequent affair with Botana stir jealousy in Botana’s influential anarchist wife, Salvadora Medina Onrubia, as well as in Siqueiros himself, turning the villa into a dramatic backdrop for what Siqueiros calls his work, Ejercicio Plástico.