Cinema Under Fire: Argentina

What forces are threatening filmmakers’ freedoms? In a series of contributions from international film critics, Filmkrant reports on the political and economical forces at work on national film production and culture. First in the series: Argentina.

“I tell the employees of the Institute that if they misbehave, I will screen them the one hundred Argentine films that were seen by less than a thousand people. It’s a great torture”. The man who lavishes such “praise” on Argentine cinema is the current director of the INCAA (National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts), Carlos Pirovano, who was invited to a pro-government streaming channel in the days prior to the last Mar del Plata International Film Festival.

Argentina is living through delirious times. It is a moment that requires taking a little distance in order not to fall into madness, into the daily indignation (or shame) produced by characters like Pirovano, and try to see everything with a bit of humor. José Martinez Suárez or Rodolfo Kuhn could have made a great film about the spectacle that Argentina has become.

But let’s be serious for a minute. In 2024’s presidential elections, which put an end to four years of a failed Peronist-progressive government (which left a 40.1% poverty rate, an 11.9% indigence rate and an accumulated inflation during the administration of 779.2%), people turned to the most radical and novel option of the electoral offer: Javier Milei and his brand-new libertarian anarcho-capitalist party La Libertad Avanza (‘Freedom Moves Forward’). Right away, and anticipated in the much parodied image of Milei wielding a chainsaw in his public rallies, the new government came to power with a very defined objective and aesthetic: become the rabid destroyers of the status quo.

“I love being the rat inside the State, I am the one who destroys the State from within”, said Milei in an interview with an American newspaper. However, in practice, the first months of his administration have shown that we are facing a right-wing neoliberal government like any other, with the same aims as any other of its kind: to adjust bills to generate friendly conditions for business with the IMF and other financial organizations; to dismantle, impoverish and then privatize as many public companies as possible so they can be sold to friendly hands; and to wage a media and cultural battle so that the impoverishment of the State and the discredit of any national ideal is not only accepted, but desired by the majority of the population.

And it is in this last point where the INCAA becomes, as producer Pablo Chernov called it in a recent intervention, a “dark object of desire”. Milei’s campaign promise of closing the INCAA was transformed, once the government took office, into ferocious budgetary and operational cutbacks which keep Argentine cinema alive, but in a sort of induced intensive therapy. Chernov concludes: “This government has reduced INCAA to its minimum expression, but it does not shut it down. Power seems to be saying: bring him to me alive. Because, finally, if they kill him, who are we going to hate?”

Unfortunately, an example of this vampiric relationship between the State and the cinema is the INCAA’s flagship festival: Mar del Plata.

Connoisseurs
A brief chronology of unfortunate events: in April, the mayor of Mar del Plata said he would not allow the cancellation of the film festival, while remarking that his idea is “to make the International Film Festival of Netflix or HBO”; in June, INCAA announced that for the first time in history it would charge submission fees to Argentine films interested in participating in the festival; in July, Fernando Juan Lima, president of the most recent editions of the Mar del Plata IFF, stepped down from his position; a few days later, by means of a decree, Milei’s government scrapped the obligation to screen Argentine films in commercial cinemas and slashed INCAA’s funding; in early August, after a large part of the festival’s programming team was fired due to budget cuts, the Mar del Plata Festival’s Artistic Director Pablo Conde resigned; a few days later, it was confirmed through INCAA’s instagram account that the festival would be held in November and a new duo of Artistic Directors was announced: Jorge Stamadianos and Gabriel Lerman, two men with experience in Hollywood television and journalism who, they declared, had never in their lives visited the Mar del Plata IFF. In a few months, the INCAA and the most important festival in Argentina made both a political and aesthetic U-turn.

Any rage against Stamadianos and Lerman is in vain, since they are simply employees parachuted in from an already incompetent institute. But through them, it is possible to clarify the aesthetic direction that this new INCAA and the Mar del Plata IFF have taken. After a lackluster, spiritually degraded edition of the festival, which for the first time in years had more empty than full theaters (although with a program inherited from the ousted administration that had several interesting points), Lerman declared in an interview that “from my place in Los Angeles there was always very little Argentine cinema to show abroad”. The fact that Argentine cinema was in the last decades one of the most celebrated by international critics and on the festival circuit seems to count for little in the eyes of one of the new directors. Although, perhaps, the issue is that these public authorities are interested in a different kind of cinema. Lerman said in the same interview: “Cinema for connoisseurs has to be in the festival, experimental cinema has to be there, but it can’t be for the masses. […] [for the next editions] if you go to see a film in a theater for 1.000 people you will see something that can be enjoyed by the majority, not by a small group”. The very formative and educational purposes of any film festival – that is, to achieve for a couple of days that the films enjoyed by a small group can be also enjoyed by the majority – are elusive concepts for the new festival administration. Or, maybe, just maybe, they don’t care that a film festival can be a space for the formation of spectators. We could place our bets.

Offensive
Provisional diagnosis: Argentine cinema (as a general concept, its production and its place in the cultural and political agenda) is nowadays trivialized, decontextualized, impoverished, and left to God’s mercy by the very institute that should watch over its health.

In the midst of this climate, the Argentine film community is beginning to show signs of reaction. This past November, in a theater near the official venues and simultaneously to the most recent edition of the Mar del Plata IFF, a national film encounter called Contracampo (‘Counterfield’) was held. This “action in defense of Argentine cinema”, as the event was described in its manifesto , was organized by a self-convened group of directors, producers, critics and film workers with the aim of confronting the “programmed destruction” of the INCAA carried out by the new administration. Over thirty contemporary Argentine films from all corners of the country were screened, forming a panorama of different production models (independent, industrial and marginal) and esthetical approaches. The latest films by filmmakers such as Celina Murga, Martín Rejtman, Mariano Llinás, Raúl Perrone and Rodrigo Moreno were screened alongside works by many emerging filmmakers. There was also room for screenings of Argentine films from the past and public talks where the Argentine film community held debates that were confrontational and self-critical (which were covered by some national media). Everything indicates that, from different fronts, an offensive against the government by the Argentine audiovisual sector is beginning to take shape.

Support
But not all evils are the responsibility of the current government. The crisis of Argentine cinema has deeper roots. In a recent interview with two of the most important Argentinian political journalists, Mariano Llinás (who by contingency went from being the champion of a mode of production independent of the INCAA bureaucracy to becoming one of its unlikely public defenders) had to explain, to the stunned perplexion of his interviewers, that he made a quite famous 14-hour film. Neither of his interlocutors had seen it, and one did not even know of its existence.

One might say: bad journalists. But the point is that this exchange is further proof that cinema (and especially Argentine cinema) has lost a lot of ground in the cultural field of the country. And with this I do not intend to nostalgically recall the times when my proletarian grandmother would go to her suburban theater to enjoy without discrimination the latest Fellini, a Hollywood western or a comedy by Fernando Ayala. Today, Argentine cinema is light years away from occupying a place even remotely similar to that: it is not present in the mass media (except to be criticized as a supposed black hole for the state treasury); the Argentine directors who are celebrated at international festivals are not known in their own country; and, mainly, their films are not easy to access.

Since the beginning of the century, Argentina has been (or was) a country with a huge and rich production of films that are terribly distributed and badly exhibited in the country (not to mention the state of their preservation). Rooting out the causes and responsible parties will require intense self-criticism on the part of the Argentine film community (Contracampo was just a brief prologue of this effort).

Today, what is certain is that the mass audience and the cinephile niches, including the majority of Argentine cinema, are two spheres that are separating more and more every day. There are many struggles ahead, but the Argentine film community should not forget the most silent, and perhaps the most crucial one: the education of spectators.

The ongoing political struggle for a new INCAA that does not turn its back on the richness of Argentine cinema appears as a marathon in which we have to work day after day. And in doing so, it is essential not to forget to work on initiatives such as Contracampo, the consolidation of regional festivals and cine-clubs, all of them activities that do nothing but to try to bring cinema closer to the people. We must not allow the tie between the Argentine audience and Argentine cinema to be completely severed.

We can once again produce hundreds of films a year, have a thriving industry with a lot of activity, win awards at the most renowned festivals, and harvest praise from the most prestigious critics in the world. But what is the use of all this if at the end of the road there is no audience that, at the very least, knows how to recognize its own cinema, its own images? One cannot desire what one does not know.