ARGENTINA: Film Industry Booming, Despite Economic Challenges

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 11 2004 (IPS) - Actor Nacho Toselli is still scaring people for a living, at the "haunted house" in a Buenos Aires shopping mall.

Although Buena Vida Delivery, the Argentine film in which he stars, was successful and has won numerous awards at international festivals, he still cannot afford to leave his unusual job.

Before he played the lead role in Buena Vida Delivery, his acting career had been limited to television, doing imitations of celebrities or playing bit parts. Today you could say he’s "almost" famous, but he still needs to work at the mall to make ends meet.

Aside from winning the award for best screenplay and the grand prize at the International Film Festival in the Argentine resort town of Mar del Plata, the movie has attracted the interest of Plan B Entertainment, the U.S. production company co-owned by actors Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.

"They’re looking for new screenplays; they want to do something different," the movie’s director, Leonardo Di Césare, told IPS. Given the fact that Buena Vida Delivery was his first film, the prospect of working with such Hollywood heavyweights is awesome.

He’s trying not to get his hopes up over the possibility of a remake, however. "I don’t think they’ll do it anytime soon," he said.

If they do, Pitt could take on the role of a motorcycle courier (played by Toselli in the original) whose life gets extraordinarily complicated when a woman moves in.

Like Toselli, Di Césare has also had his share of literally "odd" jobs. "I’ve been a lathe operator, a courier, a cameraman, even a snail farmer," he said. But thanks to the success of Buena Vida Delivery, he has gotten off to a resounding start in a whole new career.

"I’ve got an excellent distributor, who’s sold the movie really well in Spain, Israel and France," he said.

Before reaching theatres in Argentina, the movie travelled around the world, appearing at festivals and competitions in numerous countries. It went into commercial release overseas in September.

"We were invited to around 50 festivals, but we couldn’t go to all of them," Di Césare explained. The movie was shown at the Rotterdam, Chicago and Edinburgh International Film Festivals and the Latin American Film Festival in Toulouse, as well as smaller events in South Korea, the Czech Republic, Israel, New Zealand and Denmark.

The lives of the film’s characters echo the real life of the director in many respects. Like Hernán, the movie’s central character, Di Césare was left living alone in the family home after his father and sister emigrated from Argentina, fleeing the economic crisis. He also tried his hand at raising snails like one of the film’s lesser characters.

Buena Vida Delivery is a darkly comedic portrait of the Argentine middle class plunged into crisis yet incapable of recognising that their downward decline is irreversible.

When Hernán’s girlfriend’s homeless family moves in, they assure him it will only be temporary, until they get back on their feet. Soon they turn his house into a doughnut factory, once again firmly convinced that the solution to everyone’s problems is just around the corner – but of course it isn’t.

De Césare was surprised to see that although he made a film very specifically about the economic crisis in Argentina, it has struck a chord with audiences around the world.

In fact, the making of the movie could be seen as an allegory for the Argentine film industry in general.

It was produced in the middle of the economic, political and social upheaval that erupted in Argentina near the end of 2001. Its director, a complete unknown, had to stop work on it four times because he ran out of money. But once the film was finally completed, it ended up being fought over by the organisers of international festivals, and sold to distributors around the world.

Over 70 new Argentine movies will be released this year, an unprecedented number that makes the country the second biggest film producer in the Spanish-speaking world, after Spain.

Many of the movies have earned rave reviews and attracted large audiences at international film festivals. Quite a few of them are directorial debuts, like Buena Vida Delivery.

Overseas sales of Argentine films have grown tenfold since 2000, while the number of new movies made every year has skyrocketed from 10 to 70-plus. The boom in the industry has been attributed to the large crop of new filmmakers graduating from the various film schools opened throughout the country from the mid-1980s onwards.

The rights to Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens), Argentine director Fabián Bielensky’s first film, were bought by Warner Independent Pictures of the United States. The resulting U.S. remake, entitled Criminal, was released last month.

Juan José Campanella’s 2002 hit El hijo de la novia (The Son of the Bride) was screened in 33 countries, and many foreign distributors snapped up his next film, Luna de Avellaneda (Avellaneda’s Moon), sight unseen.

It is certainly not unusual for Argentine films to enjoy greater success abroad than they do at home.

For example, both Lucrecia Martel, director of La ciénaga (The Swamp) and La niña santa (The Holy Girl), and Daniel Burman, director of El abrazo partido (Lost Embrace), have won awards at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival, and the production costs of their movies have been recouped through international sales.

Back home, however, the movie theatres have been invaded by Hollywood, and Argentine films have had to fight to get a foot back in the door. Producers and directors have long complained that even when Argentine films are able to fill theatre seats, they are still pushed aside by the latest Hollywood blockbuster brought from the United States.

In response to these complaints, the National Film Insitute (INCAA) adopted a measure in June that establishes a minimum quota for Argentine films in the country’s cinemas.

For De Césare, 35, starting out as a director was not easy. A graduate of the National School of the Performing Arts, his previous experience was limited to work as a television cameraman and film classes during his student years.

When his first script was selected by INCAA for production, he was incredulous. In need of more money to get the movie made, he applied to a fund in the Netherlands that provides financing for works in progress, as well as the opportunity to have the finished film screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

The money from the Netherlands was deposited in a bank account in Buenos Aires in late 2001, when the government ordered the freezing of all bank accounts, in an unsuccessful attempt to ward off an impending financial crisis.

The country was plunged into chaos. Demonstrations and rioting in the streets and the subsequent police crackdown left at least 20 people dead. Unemployment and poverty soared to unprecedented highs. The country went through five presidents in the space of two weeks. And the Argentine currency, the peso, collapsed.

When the filmmakers were finally able to retrieve their money, originally deposited in dollars, it was given to them in Argentine pesos, which had been on a par with the dollar before the devaluation, but were now worth three times less.

Half of the movie was made with first takes, because they couldn’t afford to waste film on reshoots. If something went wrong when a scene was shot, it just had to stay that way, explained the director.

Now everyone is eagerly awaiting the completion of Di Césare’s second feature film, Fe (Faith), set in the eastern Argentine province of Santa Fe during the disastrous flood of 2003.

The lead character lives on the roof of his house, left almost completely underwater, and protects his few belongings with a shotgun. But the director claims the movie isn’t aimed at making a political statement. "It’s a love story," he insists.