Stories and discoveries of lost films, unfinished works or unrealized projects. "That erudition is not necessarily arid is demonstrated by this book, where the author invites the most enjoyable exploration that can be imagined, that of a reality unknown to almost all readers. Cocteau created the name "cursed film" to draw attention to works that were not appreciated at the time, ignored, forgotten, even prohibited. Peña takes up the phrase, he says it himself, at a time when the digital revolution has exhumed the most obscure titles, allowing the creation of unpredictable cults. Let's remember times when, for example, The Golden Age of Buñuel and Dalí, kidnapped in 1930, forbidden, was the best-kept treasure of the Cinémathèque Française. When its legendary creator Henri Langlois agreed to lend the print for a single screening at the Cinémathèque Suisseise, the 35mm cans departed by train in a bag literally handcuffed to the wrist of his trusted collaborator, the historian Lotte Eisner... A few decades later, at the end of the last century, the film had already been restored, broadcast by a cultural channel of French television, and immediately released on DVD. And yet the cinematograph has not remained unscathed by other accidents, those that its very nature causes, whether it is a question of technical support or the nature of its dissemination. Where is the unprecedented, fragile color system tested for Tati's Holiday? The ups and downs of Argentine politics, in a pathetic vaudeville, condemned, later rescued, and finally relegated to a lasting darkness Poor There Will Always Be Poor. In Argentina, precisely, the creation of a national cinematheque that protects and disseminates the country's cinematographic heritage has not been achieved. Peña points out that the past of Argentine cinema, largely lost, surviving in often blurred, inaudible copies, corresponds in the most literal sense to the denomination of cursed cinema. A book like this, only possible because its author combines the passion of a tenacious detective and the love for cinema beyond any petty criterion of value, will reveal to the reader that there is a vast, barely explored "treasure island", open to the imagination and, why not say it, to the irrepressible desire to access everything that, we found out, it has been hidden from us". Edgardo Cozarinsky