In Viaje a Marte (2005), a claymation film by Argentine Juan Pablo Zaramella, a young boy travels to Mars with his grandfather in his rickety tow truck. Zaramella's longest short film to date, sixteen minutes in duration, is what critic Rachel Haywood Ferreira calls an “anti-bildungsroman” (26). In a brief storyline, Zaramella recounts a child's fascination with space travel and his return to his first occupational passion as an astronaut after having given it up to take on the family business upon being humiliated by his peers when he exclaims that he traveled to Mars with his grandfather. The whimsical and visually striking film celebrates Argentina's unique terrain as the director – having based the topography on the Valle de la Luna, or Moon Valley, in the Parque Nacional Talmpaya of northeast Argentina – leaves his audience with an ambiguous ending in which it is unclear whether the protagonist, as an adult, returns to the physical earthly region of the Valle de la Luna or to that of his favorite planetary neighbor, Mars. Despite the film's open ending, it is clear that in Argentina's isolated, exceptional terrain, transformational possibilities abound.

Like this otherworldly terrain, Argentina's vast Patagonia region, the location of César Aira's La costurera y el viento (1994), has often left tourists, writers, scientists and explorers struggling to find earthly lexicon to convey the awe-inspiring nature of an area that is referred to as the “End of the Earth.” Aira's brief travelogue of sorts allows a talented seamstress to leave the safe space of her neighborhood to make an unlikely journey that results in unresolved and unending transformations. Her profession as the town's most talented seamstress privileges her to certain surreal encounters – namely the infatuation of the Wind – and to improbable travels into boundless nature, far from the gendered confines of her small, gossip-ridden town.