In El abrazo partido, Jewish-Argentine Joseph Makaroff confesses to his younger brother Ariel that he has a girlfriend. Eager to know who she is, Ariel asks Joseph, ‘¿cómo se llama?’ [what's her name?], to which Joseph replies, ‘Adelaida’. Unsatisfied with the answer, Ariel insists once more, ‘¿Adelaida qué?’ [Adelaida what?]. Understanding his brother's intention to discover his girlfriend's ethnicity, Joseph says, ‘mirá, Adelaida no es judía, es paraguaya. Me lleva a la bailanta, comemos comidas típicas’ [look, Adelaida is not Jewish, she is Paraguayan. She brings me to the bailanta, we eat traditional food]. After explaining to Ariel how he and Adelaida met, Joseph confesses to his brother, ‘me enamoré, me enamoré perdidamente’ [I fell in love, I fell madly in love]. While the answer Joseph gives Ariel reflects the importance of romantic love over ethnic allegiance, Ariel's inquisitiveness encapsulates one of the concerns of Jewish families since their arrival in Argentina, namely romantic relationships with, and marriage to, non-Jews.

Through the years, cinema has captured the problematic issues that surround mixed couples and woven stories that have brought the topic to life. In her work on Jewish–Gentile relationships in cinema, Nora Glickman has chronicled the evolution of romances between Jews and Gentiles as well as the changes in attitude towards these unions in films from Argentina and the United States. After examining more than twenty films, she confidently concludes that ‘there is a trend towards increased integration of Jews into the fibre of society, from parental condemnation of interfaith relations among first-generation immigrants to full acceptance in the present’. In this chapter, I analyse two films that fall under this trend of integration and acceptance, Daniel Burman's Derecho de familia from 2006 and Ariel Winograd's Mi primera boda from 2011. In both films, the main protagonists are Jewish males married to, or about to marry, Gentile women. Aided by a more positive view of interfaith couples in contemporary Argentine society, Burman and Winograd appropriate Jewish–Gentile liaisons to explore family life. As such, Derecho de familia and Mi primera boda revolve around the family unit to propose ways of holding the family together against a social context of family disintegration. Although a global phenomenon, family breakdown in Argentina is linked to the dramatic changes undergone by Argentine society.