The Mirror Man is a wonderful 2007 documentary on Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine writer and poet. Borges is considered, along with Gabriel García Márquez, as one of the main progenitors of the school of “magical realism” in literature, or writing which seeks to generate “poetic faith” in readers, of fantastical and illogical situations, objects, devices and events. Despite suffering from progressive blindness for most of his life, Borges wrote of time, dreams, infinity, the universe, secret societies impenetrable labyrinths, memory, folk heroes, God and his fascination with, and childhood fear of, mirrors, a major recurring theme in his work. He is one of Latin America’s most famous and beloved literary figures.

This wide-ranging biography, directed by Philippe Molins, boasts some superb archival video footage of 20th century Buenos Aires and interviews with Borges’s mother, his second wife and the writer himself, who died in 1986. It was written by Alberto Manguel, who believes that the central theme of Borges works was the “curious paradox of being human in a mysterious and incomprehensible world.”