Elisa Carricajo: Piel de Lava and El Pampero Cine in dialogue

Interview translated by Alma Prelec and Maria Delgado.

The histories of El Pampero Cine and Piel de Lava are intertwined. Both are companies founded within 12 months of each other: the former in 2002, the latter in 2003. Both have provided ways of working that challenge auteurship as a model embodied in a single driving creative force. For El Pampero the ethos is one based on four collaborators — Laura Citarella, Mariano Llinás, Agustín Mendilaharzu and Alejo Moguillansky — who support each other as producers, editors, cinematographers on the projects they each conceive as writer-directors. It’s a model of collective creativity that harks back to the création collective ideal of the 1960s and ‘70s promoted by Roger Planchon that proved so pervasive in Latin America with companies such as Teatro la Candelaria, Cuatrotablas and Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani.

Piel de Lava are perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for their work in Llinás’ 14-hour epic La Flor (English title The Flower, completed between 2016 and 2018), but Piel de Lava is much more than La Flor, as the company’s seven theatre productions to date show.  The performers who make up Piel de Lava — Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa and Laura Paredes — met in 2003, while undertaking workshops with actor-writer-directors Rafael Spregelburd and Alejandro Catalán, and have been making theatre, with director Héctor Díaz on their first two productions and then Laura Fernández who has been working with them since 2009. Their six productions to date, Colores verdaderos (True Colours, 2003), Neblina (Mist, 2005), Tren (Train, 2009), Museo (Museum, 2014), Petróleo (Petroleum, 2015), and Parlamento (Parliament, 2023) have converted Piel de Lava into a key reference point in the contemporary Buenos Aires theatre scene. Buenos Aires boasts one of the most diverse theatre ecologies on the globe. Writing of theatre in the aftermath of the 2001 economic crisis — both El Pampero Cine and Piel de Lava were formed in its direct aftermath — Jean Graham-Jones writes that:

“Even in crisis, Buenos Aires has remained home to arguably more theatrical activity than any other city in Latin America and possibly the world, with its hundreds of theatres located in the Corrientes Street theatre district, as well as scattered throughout the capital of nearly thirteen million inhabitants. In this city of commercial, independent, cooperative, state, and union- and university-affiliated theatres, one can also attend performances in hotels and cultural centres, under tents and inside dance clubs, in public plazas and private homes, and even on buses and subway cars.”¹

The lithe, enterprising ethos and resourcefulness of El Pampero Cine, its thinking outside the box in its mode of making and distributing work is in many ways modelled on Buenos Aires theatre ecology. The Buenos Aires theatre scene with its 300+ venues also provided an arena for company members’ theatrical outings. Agustín Mendilaharzu co-authored and co-directed Los Talentos (The Talents, 2010) and La edad de oro (The Golden Age, 2011) with Walter Jacob – a regular actor with El Pampero Cine boasting roles in La Flor, Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella, 2022), La edad media (The Middle Ages, Luciana Acuña and Alejo Moguillansky, 2022) Por el dinero (For the Money, Alejo Moguillansky, 2019), La Flor and La vendedora de fósforos (The Little Match Girl, Alejo Moguillansky, 2017), El escarabajo de oro, or Victorias Hamnd (The Gold Bug, or Victoria’s Revenge,  2014), El loro y el cisne The Parrot and the Swan (The Parrot and the Swan, Alejo Moguillansky , 2013), and Historias extraordinarias (Mariano Llinás , 2008). The literary gameplay, layered narratives and sharp dialogue of Los talentos and La edad de oro, echoing David Mamet’s linguistic dexterity, seemed to be in conversation with Moguillansky’s El loro y el cisne and El escarabajo de oro, (co-directed by Moguillansky with Fia-Stina Sandlund).² Moguillansky’s participatory street film Efectos especiales/Special Effects realized with dance company Grupo Krapp’s Luciana Acuña is itself a further example of El Pampero’s spillage into live performance.³ Performance and the performative run through Moguillansky’s Castro (2009) and La edad media — both Beckettian in themes, references and/or influences.

Parlamento

Indeed, in a conversation at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on 15 September 2019, Mariano Llinás spoke of the importance of the ‘do it yourself’ ethos of Buenos Aires’ enterprising independent theatre scene – and many dozens of its leading figures including Rafael Spregelburd, Romina Paula, Agustina Muñoz, and Héctor Díaz have cameo roles in La Flor alongside the four Piel de Lava leads — as an inspiration for El Pampero. Indeed, this collective mode of theatre-making is key to understanding El Pampero. Both companies promote an ethos of risk taking, of working on a shoestring budget, developing pieces over extended periods of time between other projects that the different company members may be working on – as with Llinás collaboration as screenwriter with Santiago Mitre, most recently on Argentina 1985 (2022) a film that also features Paredes in a key role, or Pilar Gamboa’s roles in Lo que más quiero (The Thing I Love the Most, Delfina Castagnino, 2010) and Todos mienten (They All Lie, Matías Piñeiro, 2009).

This interview with Elisa Carricajo explores the multilayered intersections between Piel de Lava and El Pampero Cine. While the collaboration with El Pampero Cine is most evident in La Flor, a project shot over nine years beginning in 2008, the dialogue that follows shows the many ways in which the two companies have been in artistic dialogue. La Flor runs through the entire interview – in part because of its lengthy development. The film was originally conceived as an adaptation of Piel de Lava’s Neblina, but when they began work with Llinás what emerged was a film divided into three parts with six separate episodes that explored the very nature of film itself. Gliding across different genres – from the B-Movie to the musical, the spy thriller to the film-within-a-film, the silent movie to the quest narrative – La Flor’s weaving together a mosaic of witty tales that transport the viewer across different countries, languages and time periods finds an echo in Piel de Lava’s adventurous theatrical games with genre. Filled with storylines about disguise, duplicity, digressions, and illusion, La Flor is a film about acting – from the loud, melodramatic performances of the laboratory-set horror flick of episode 1, to the low-key musical register of episode 2, the non-verbal language of the 1980s spies in episode 3, the frustration of episode 4 as the actresses tire of the film within the film, and the quiet silence of the final episode where two of the actresses are visually pregnant and emerging from their time in the desert into a new world. Both companies nurture projects over years as they assemble the finance needed to develop their ventures: part three of La Flor (made up of episodes 4, 5 and 6), took four and a half years to shoot; Trenque Lauquen was filmed over two extended periods in 2017 and 2021/2, Parlamento took a year to develop through a research residency at the multidisciplinary Arthaus Central in Buenos Aires: research and rehearsals from February to June 2023 and then performed in development through June to December 2023. The piece opened in its ‘definitive’ form in January 2024 at Chile’s Santiago a Mil festival.

Carricajo’s reflections, made during the shoot for a new, as yet untitled collaboration with Laura Citarella, provide an actor’s perspective on the Piel de Lava El Pampero Cine associations. These intersecting encounters, running across almost two decades, are presented as playful, curious, unexpected and enriching – captured through recollections that map a process of making work where the theatrical and the cinematic prove mutually enriching. 

The first film that you made with El Pampero was Historias extraordinaries (Extraordinary Stories, 2008).

Yes, and it was extraordinary. We began to get together, the Piel de Lava group, with Mariano (Llinás) and Agustín (Mendilaharzu), to eat empanadas and have a glass of wine, on Monday evenings, and in theory to write a script about a play we had done. That was the initial project and it lasted about a year and a half. In the middle of that, they were finishing up Historias extraordinarias, and the actress that was going to do what I do (in the film) got sick, or something happened to her. I had left (to film) the first feature that I acted in, in large scale or what I would term ‘industrial cinema’. I had been in a small town near Buenos Aires, called Pipinas, for a month, working on beautiful film which is called Camara Obscura. Mariano called me at Pipinas, asking me if I could do what that (other) actress was supposed to be doing, and we ended up filming in another town, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, called Monte. I checked with the other film crew, to see when and if I might be able to go, and I went to film with Mariano, and it was very gratifying. 

We (Piel de Lava) hadn’t started working with film until about our late twenties or early thirties. In our twenties, we did a lot of theatre, but almost no films at all — I had only worked on a short film or two. The film I had gone (away) to shoot was a period piece, and there was a lot of makeup work, and an impeccable, beautiful artistic process, but I had become a bit bored. I loved the film, but it seemed to me like a lot of time was spent waiting around. I had had more fun making theatre. But then (with Mariano) it was fantastic, because I had gone with the boys by car, to this town, to film in the house of a friend’s parents, and in fact the father of the friend who had lent us his house later acts in La Flor, and Martin Mauregui, who is a film director as well, and we had a fantastic time. It was a two-day shoot, we had such a laugh, there with Mariano; we spoke about politics, and at first, we really argued, but it all somehow happened and got resolved within a day. There was a sort of vitality there, and I thought, this is my home. I can come and go, there are other spaces, other ways of working, but here, I feel at home. We still weren’t even properly friends then, but it was clear, something in them worked well with me, and something about me worked well with them. From the beginning there was something very empathetic and intimate about the work. 

So, when you shot Historias extraordinaries, were you already discussing adapting Neblina? 

Yes. Mariano and Agustín came to see Neblina in the theatre, and Héctor Díaz – who was the director, the co-director alongside us, who ended up acting in La Flor, playing (Ricky), the character that was Pili’s partner, in the second story, the melodrama –  Héctor had met the guys, I don’t remember how, he knew Agustín, and that was the context in which the idea of creating a film off the back of the play emerged. And this cycle of meeting up, eating empanadas and drinking wine, in the old El Pampero site in Laprida began – basically, we became friends. We were working on a script, but we were also getting to know each other, and now it’s been — I don’t know — seventeen or eighteen years, that we’ve been friends. The grounding of that friendship was established, which was not just a friendship, but also a meeting point between two groups. That collaboration continues to exist today, in many different forms —also because both companies, as we were forming ourselves – we started to exchange information, between us, about how to shape and run a company over time, how to make concrete what each group wanted to do. It was very fruitful. Historias extraordinarias came about around halfway through this process, about halfway through doing Neblina, with a script that was abandoned and never picked up again…

And the project of creating a film from Neblina led to La Flor.

We started to meet up in, let’s say, September 2006 — although I can’t remember the exact year. And throughout the whole year we kept meeting. And at the end of the year, Mariano returns and says that Neblina wasn’t happening, but that he was going to make the greatest gesture of love that a director could make to a group of actresses. He presents the project, La Flor, in those terms. There was a mix of enthusiasm and nostalgia, also, about abandoning the other project. But I think there was also a sense of trust, that what he was telling us was going to work, and a trust in the group. Because even though Mariano is the director and writer of La Flor, and part of the film is coming from his mind, Pampero Cine and Piel de Lava produced it. In that sense, it was completely a group effort, in terms of production. And that’s where the novelty of working on a production process like this one begins. Because what is production? Perhaps it is this – someone can come and say, I’m going to do a gesture of love for all you, and we’re going to be working on a film for five years. Let’s go. And the group agreed. The production of the film was supported by the friendship that had first emerged.

La Flor, Episode 1

Could you tell me about your work with the scripts, and how these evolved? Did Mariano already have something written that was quite prepared, or were there ideas that were then worked on by Piel de Lava and Mariano as a group? How did the process evolve?

I started working alongside him from outset, because this project happened off the back of the previous process of writing together, with Neblina. And we had this system of writing together. But the truth is it was a collaborative process. In San Juan, in episode 1, with the mummies, I worked on the script with Mariano, in a sort of collaboration. But the truth is he already had in his head a clear idea (of what he wanted). It was a lot of fun because we would meet up, and talk about horror films, and all that, and it was all very easy. From the second episode on, we started leaving that collaboration behind, without really thinking about it, not consciously. He would tell us the things he thought, and we would bounce off these, discuss, compare, and sometimes add an idea, or similar. He wrote the third episode, the entire thing, from start to finish. That’s how it was filmed; it was, as they say, an ‘iron script’. Out of the all the episodes, that was the one that had a script. In episode 4, we had a concrete idea, but there was no script. We didn’t know what was going on anymore. That was a moment where the film felt very disconnected. Episode 5, which is a kind of re-make of the other film, we kind of knew where it was going. Episode 6 had been prepared from the beginning, because there isn’t really text here, it’s more like a succession of images. So, each part had its own process. But everything in the film emerges very much from Mariano’s world. It’s his world; in that sense, it’s not a collaboration, except when he is writing and thinking about us (as performers) – when he writes.

You began shooting La Flor in 2009. Could you tell me a bit about the production process and how it evolved, chronologically? Because when I think of El Pampero, it is about the different members of the company taking on roles to support each film — whoever is the director. Laura may produce Mariano’s film and Alejo edits it. Agustín is cinematographer on one film and director on another. Laura directs one film and here Mariano produces. With each Pampero film the core group take different roles. When you are working on the films, how does this process unfold?

With La Flor, Mariano very clearly started out being, let’s say ‘the director’ and playing that role. Agustín was director of photography. Laura was the producer. That was how it worked. Alejo went on editing the film, with others as well as time went on. Laura was always the producer of the film. At first, she was first an all-purpose producer, covering everything, including catering, because we were such a small group. 

There was a sense that we would all do a bit of everything. Laura was the producer, she was also assistant director (because we didn’t have that role covered). As the years went on, this changed a bit, Agustín was no longer always the DP; there were some moments where others took on this role, because for whatever reason Agustín couldn’t do it. Towards the end, I remember one of the last scenes of La Flor that we had to shoot, Agustín wasn’t always there, and there was a whole wave of what we called ‘young Pamperos’ that took on several roles. I remember the scene, it was a retake, and Mariano wasn’t even there anymore! Agustín (Gagliardi the assistant director on Episodes 4, 5 and 6 of La Flor) was there; and I said laughing, ‘Agustín what do we do?’, but in a sense he had already taken on the role. But to return to your question, we started out with these roles that were really specific, and yet covered many areas, but then turned into a bigger, broader group, where the roles started to blend and mix. 

La Flor, Episode 6

Behind the Scenes of La Flor, Episode 6

During the duration of the film you have all changed as actresses. Looking at the first and then the last episode of the film, you are all so physically different. This is marked on the body – the years, ageing, pregnancy. Films sometimes try and erase these differences, covering them up with make-up, costumes and special effects but here it is all very open, that La Flor was filmed over the course of a decade. 

Yes, there was a moment that the notion of how long (filming) would last disappeared; as did the notion of if the film would even ever be finished. At one point it just became a permanent process, a part of life, that we were doing. Every now and then, we would have more intense periods, then less intense ones, and with different levels of conflict, too. I recently read a section from a diary I kept when we went to film in Russia, on the Trans-Siberian (Express). We all kept diaries, and there I did write about it. ‘I don’t know if we’re going to finish this film’. I guess the sensation I had was that we weren’t going to finish. Mariano seemed very sure of it, but we all saw it as a bit lost at times. I guess there was the Amorosity, the love and care necessary for the process to keep going. The film would happen, when it had to had to happen, and when it could. But at one moment, the idea of making a film seemed to disappear, or at least it disappeared from our end. We kind of lost this idea of finishing it. It was more like, every now and then we go and shoot. 

And was it difficult to go back to it? Given that you were shooting in parts. 

No. Filming — the moment of shooting — was always the easiest bit and very enjoyable. That was the best bit. Rather, there were a lot of difficulties at the peripheries of the film, let’s say outside of filming. Sometimes there were difficult parts that got in the way, in other areas. Because you had to coordinate schedules; or I don’t know, you might be shooting something else, a film, or working on a play. We weren’t filming the project in a standalone way, rather, we were a group of people, that all had other jobs and were doing many other things; so we had to find times to schedule shoots. For example, the trip to Russia, it took us years to plan. We ended up having to go in January/February, and I had to say, ‘It’ll be 25 degrees below zero. I don’t have the clothes for this and I can’t buy them now; because it’s December in Buenos Aires and it’s 40 degrees out. There isn’t even a place to buy these clothes.’ And I started sending out emails to people I know, and nobody had anything, because it’s never (that) cold here. In the end, the costume I wore — the windbreaker — was from the grandmother of a friend, who lent me this down jacket. There is a fur hat I wear in the film which was the hat my grandmother brought back from Russia in 1986. And so, all those things were more tedious than the actual filming process.

La Flor, Episode 3

It reminds me of the improvisation process you might find in the theatre. It feels very much like the shooting process had theatrical elements.

I remember, I became quite distressed, because there are some scenes, with the spies, that I have my hair like this (points to shoulder), and in the following cut, my hair is down to my waist, and I was so worried about things like that, and Mariano didn’t care; he really didn’t care. That was good, when I began to understand that in the end it doesn’t matter to the film. You’re not thinking about that as the viewer: this jacket isn’t from the 1970s or 1980s, it’s from the year 2000, it has stitching. But what matters is that more or less, it works. 

Behind the Scenes of La Flor, Episode 1

How would you describe Mariano Llinás as a director? 

With every passing year, Mariano becomes more like a character from his own films, and especially from these new films. This is a curmudgeon-like persona, or a politically incorrect one, but at the same time he has an amusing quality, which is an ability to make fun of himself. And this person that you see (on the surface), you can tell him anything, whatever you want; it won’t phase him. On the contrary, I think he likes confrontation, action, and all that. I’ve learned with the years not to fall in this trap and not to provoke him. And then he is someone that is, above all, in love with cinema. He seems to have a connection with it that is almost childlike, in the best sense of the word. He has an open fascination with cinema, with the whole genre. La Flor is very much about cinema as a genre. And so, to speak of what is necessary to do in the film (with him), is to become a child again watching a film. There is something about that fascination, that first fascination, like the spies in La Flor, that is very contagious. It’s like something that goes through an emotional place, like a place where popular culture is in the deepest place in our hearts. And after this, comes the reflection: ‘Oh, we’re not exactly doing a period piece, we’re making a film that dialogues with period pieces, but in an Argentine context’. But that intelligence comes later. The beginning is really like playing toy soldiers. There is always something there that is very contagious in a positive sense. It’s beautiful and fun. 

Behind the Scenes of La Flor

Mariano takes a lot of time to explain what he believes, what he has seen, where each reference is taken from, what this character is like and why. I think if someone were to meet him in another circumstance, they might think, ‘I don’t like directors that don’t treat people well, or this or that, or I could never work with someone who is like this, and much less still with a man’. And yet he is the very much the opposite of all this; he’s like an overgrown kid. He is very generous with what enthuses him and that draws people in. It makes you want to play with him and play at what he is playing at. And the films are like this, like a permanent regression to a very elementary fascination with cinema…

And very playful. 

Totally. Very ludic. 

There are lovely games with El Pampero’s films. The films appear to be in conversation with each other. A good example is Trenque Lauquen which seems to be in dialogue with La Flor. Both are gloriously long films and in both cases when I’ve talked about programming them, people ask me, why they are not a series? Both are defiantly films and clearly conceived as such. I do think there are also differences between them. Trenque Lauquen has a feminist and I would argue, a feminine, ethos. Both are playful and playing with genre. 

I’ve just thought, on the question of why the films are not series, it’s because they are films, and none of the filmmakers from El Pampero starts with the idea of making a series. Because the format of a series (and I like series) thinks about the episodic in a way that hooks you in from one episode to the next. And here, what happens with La Flor, and with Trenque Lauquen as well, is that they have a length, but only because the directors allow it. In the case of Trenque Lauquen, there was another script. Laura had prepared a script, she shot it; and it wasn’t quite finished. She wrote it again, and then shot it again. And then the film became four hours, that’s how it happened. It wasn’t originally going to be that long. It was a long film already, it was two and a half or three hours; but the fact that it became a really long film of over four hours was because she needed more time to resolve the film. There is no rule about how long films need to be. That seems to be me to be a gesture of liberty that doesn’t dialogue with the series genre. The film wasn’t conceived as something episodic, it’s a unified whole. 

I was also shooting in two very different time periods. I was pregnant, and then there was Lucero, at five years old. That was all very fun. I think the film is very intuitive. It was a film that Laura found during the process of making it. She found it in the doing. There was already a script, with its own particularities and dramas, but during the shooting process, the film revealed that other things were needed: other rhythms, other genres that had to appear. Some things were maintained, they were always there: the town, the province of Buenos Aires, that woman – and I think also, in the middle of all this, the pregnancies happened. Laura’s first, Laura Paredes’ (the protagonist and co-writer’s) son was just born, and so we filmed while he was very small, and I was pregnant, and then Laura (the director) also got pregnant, and so there something there, about maternities, because we were creating this character, who was sort of savage, and coming out from the lake, this child, or this amphibian, and maternity has something of this. It was impossible to film this project and to go through pregnancy and birth without it impacting the film in some way. I would say that perhaps the most ‘amphibian’ side of maternity, the most bodily side, that became very tangible, though it was originally tangential to the film. So, I feel that the process (of the film) also had to embark on that moment of life in which children were suddenly born. And all this, as I said before, affected the logistics of shooting. Something from that moment in life entered the film. I think the film, of course, was made from a feminist perspective, but it appears in a moment in which feminism experienced a sort of explosion — globally but particularly in Argentina along with the question of abortion rights. I don’t mean this as something on an agenda list; this was really happening to us; and we started to ask ourselves questions that we hadn’t really considered with so much clarity: how we worked, what were our connections. I think Trenque Lauquen had do with a political and historical moment. So rather than directly engage with this as a topic, the film emerged from this vital moment: when we, as women, began to consider how we were represented, how we worked.

I think there was also a change within El Pampero that began then. Laura had made Ostende and La mujer de los perros, which is an enormous film. Laura Paredes, worked on the script, alongside Laura Citarella, during the whole process. So it wasn’t the dynamic of an actress being solely an ‘actress’, but rather an actress that was much more involved in the process of decision making. I think those are also collaborative processes that are themselves related to feminism, with what feminism made us consider. The decision makers were women, within a structure where traditionally it has been men – without this being necessarily a conscious idea from outset. (I’ve been in projects where this was the case, but here, it wasn’t). But in any case, when such a movement begins, it makes you say, ‘ah, look – we were there as well’. 

Behind the Scenes of Trenque Lauquen

And when did you film Trenque Lauquen? 

I shot in 2017. And then again, in 2021/22. In between, I wasn’t working on it and also, there was the pandemic. Some things were shot in 2018. That’s when Laura went off with the film, she watched it, she edited it, and throughout 2020 they re-wrote it. And in 2021 and 2022, it was shot again. 

 So as with La Flor, it was a very long process.

Absolutely. A very long process and with lots of rehearsal. But it turned out very nicely, and I was glad that Laura took the liberty of doing what she did, something that nobody that works in industrial cinema can do: shoot a film, edit it, and decide that, oh, it needs two more hours. And film those two hours, add them, and have the film turn out fantastic. So, it was really a process that only this type of production (house) could create.

What is Laura like as a director? 

We’re very close friends; it’s hard to say. We’ve worked together on several occasions, and in theatre, so I’m not sure if I can quite say how she is as a ‘director’. I would perhaps say, however, that outside filming, as a person she talks a lot and it’s not always clear what she wants to say, but on the shoot she is very clear and concrete. She’s very strong as well. So, for example, there is a shot in Trenque Lauquen which was extremely difficult, because we had to shoot it at night, with a bonfire — we used a real one. I’m not sure if it was a good idea, but she is very resistant, and she shoulders it all. She has qualities that are usually attributed to masculinity: force and resistance. You don’t see this as much with Laura in other contexts. She has something very powerful on set: she knows well what she wants. So, it’s nice to work with her because it’s very clear on what you need to do. She’s precise, and with gestures as well. I have the impression that when she goes to shoot, she’s already imagined it all in her mind with great clarity.  

 When I see the performances in Laura’s films, I always feel there is something very clean in the acting, that’s different to Mariano. Mariano has something more mischievous, perhaps a little more ornate or knowing.  

And this relates to the script too. The performances lean on the words, and how those words are said, in a determinate way; if you read the script, you’ll realise it’s already written there. This has happened to me elsewhere; that you read the script aloud, and they say to you, ‘no, there was a comma there’. And you look at it, read it aloud again respecting the comma, and that way it suddenly works. The performances, the gazes, the expressions, a certain dryness are all prepared carefully – it’s true. With Mariano there’s something a bit more playful, although Laura also has a very good sense of humour. This is good, because sometimes with cinema of this style, it doesn’t allow for comedy. And the great thing about Trenque Lauquen is that there is a lot of humour. 

La Flor, Episode 1

La Flor, Episode 2

La Flor, Episode 3

La Flor, Episode 4

Absolutely, and in a way that is very different to La Flor. There is humour in La Flor. Episode 1 with the mummies has a wonderful sense of humour. Episode 3 with the spies also. I feel with Mariano, the humour is more Borges; with Laura, the humour is more Beckettian…Working with Laura on her current short, do you feel that she has changed as a director? Do you see an evolution after Trenque Lauquen?

I could tell you more in the sense of being her friend. A lot of things happened around Trenque Lauquen. Some great things. And I think Laura is still asking herself how this will affect her career and her filmmaking, because it’s almost a form of consecration — although that is not quite the right word. Or rather (a matter of) affirming her position. But we’ll have to see, because this was a process that took a long time: it was seven years between when it was first conceived, then written, and then shot. La mujer de los perros was also a long process. I think that is perhaps the particularity. They have found a way of working that allows them this time. All of last year was spent receiving the impact Trenque Lauquen had produced, in the best sense (of the word). The sense I have is it is only now that she can begin to think about other processes.

The model for El Pampero is drawn from the model of independent theatre in Buenos Aires.

In a way, what El Pampero and Piel de Lava did, that had never happened before, was that Argentine cinema was not drawing on the enormous stream of production of independent theatre. Not only did the industry not look for actors from independent theatres — the most basic and simple thing — but it also didn’t take from the production model of independent theatre in Buenos Aires, which is very important and powerful. Nor did it take advantage of its themes or its concerns. And in the aftermath of this connection, in parallel, there were suddenly lots of crossovers, that were very interesting, where fortunately these two worlds, which had been completely siloed, started to come closer together. Independent theatre is created with scarce financial resources, above all in Buenos Aires. If you want to make a play, you get together with friends and you just do it; with more or less budget, you get on with it. In cinema, on the other hand, usually, someone writes a script, and it remains on pause until someone finds a way to finance it. And that’s what Mariano is talking about, too (when he mentions El Pampero’s link to Buenos Aires’ independent theatre scene). ‘We’re not going to wait until the film’s finances are all ready, before we start; let’s film what we can now, in your house, on that day – oh good, we already have a scene. Good, when we’re able to, we’ll go to Russia and film there, but in the meantime, let’s get started here – with your aunt’s wig, and her shoes’, just as happens in the theatre. 

How do the characteristics of working with El Pampero remain with you and/or the work of Piel de Lava. How do they shape your work in cinema as an actress?

Well, with respect to cinema, as I was saying earlier, with my first ‘industrial cinema’ project, I was a bit bored during the process and structure. I learned how to not get bored and realised how to have fun filming anything; they gifted me a love of cinema and a love for the process of making films that is invaluable. That changed me a lot. It gave me a joy for shooting, a passion for every small thing you can do with your face in front a camera, the details of it, the obsession for these details. This ends up being useful for any job, even the most commercial ones. 

I think that with respect to the work of Piel de Lava, concretely, Pampero Cine gave us a lot of liberty – something we maybe had already, but that became much stronger after working with them — of creating what we wanted, of taking the time we needed. A combination of a professional responsibility and a sort of anarchism and chaos and total liberty to do what we wanted. Like a form of trust and self-belief that is the base of Pampero. They were a bit older than we were when we began — now you can’t (really) see it, but they had something already, like, ‘we are artists, we do what we want’. We, on the other hand, were still trying to figure out how we worked and organised ourselves. So, they gifted us that, in a country where things can be difficult, we learned to believe everything would work out: it will be made, it’s possible, things can come up, and as my grandmother said, you don’t have to put all your eggs in one basket. 

Could you tell me a bit about your work with Matías Piñeiro? He also navigates that relationship between cinema and theatre, though perhaps in a more structured way. He also casts actors from independent theatre. There’s also a degree of self-referentiality in films such as Viola (2012) and La princesa de Francia (The Princess of France, 2014), of winking at an audience, and of course a love letter to Buenos Aires. El Pampero’s films don’t have this same relationship to Buenos Aires.

We’re from the same generation. Many things brought us together before we had actually worked together. And when the moment came to film Viola, in fact it was because we’d done a theatre play – that is then itself in Viola. We were doing a play about Shakespeare, because he was researching Shakespeare, and he invited a group of friends, and then those of us in the film, Gabi (Saidon), Agustina (Muñoz), Laura (Paredes) and I – María (Villar) was pregnant and couldn’t do it – to do a play with sections from Shakespeare. And I hadn’t worked on Shakespeare since I was in drama school. It was beautiful, all of us returning to Shakespeare. This was the first play he had directed in the theatre, and then he came and said he wanted to shoot a little film with this and that. So we did film, over a series of days, here and there, doing the play again and then filming – and then it screened at BAFICI (Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival)! An incredible film. I couldn’t believe it. Matias has this ability to make you feel like it’s all very casual, that you’re not doing anything major, you’re having fun. He’s so patient, such a relaxed person, there is no pressure – and yet he is constantly working, he is extremely hard working, you can never pull him away from what he is doing. I think that with La princesa de Francia, I expected it more. But with Viola it was all new. Working from this starting point of friendship, all of us had been in the play – we were also all doing other things; but we’re all from the same circle, same generation, very close, a group of friends getting together, working with the camera, and things came out. This sort of naturalism; like you don’t understand how it’s cinema, and then it’s so beautiful, everything he does.  

It’s almost like Chekhov. There is something very Chekhovian about Matías. He feels someone like another side of the coin to El Pampero and in many ways his films feel in dialogue with El Pampero’s films. Perhaps because they often feature actors that are part of El Pampero’s films. All part of the same ecosystem.

Endnotes