2024-04-14 03:01:00
I had a teacher who wrote poetry and always left us feeling and thinking. He taught me that a film had to start strong, sowing the birth of a tree that was going to be the story. With him I also learned that art in confinement contexts frees people. And it is not a question of having talent, but of the possibility we have of opening that meeting with others. He wrote: “What did you do with love while the other person suffered?” (Vicente Zito Lema).
His voice resonates in my memory, his question insists. What are we doing with love in the face of so much destruction, so much damage that circulates in us and that little by little is drowning our loved ones, the people we met in each film in which we participate. What are we doing with the pain that those people who were part of the stories are suffering?
Once, from the INCAA Cinema in Cárceles program, I participated in a virtual conversation with young people deprived of their liberty. With an edge that I admired, one of the boys spoke up and angrily began to list all the things they were needing. I didn’t know how to intervene. I remember the feeling of helplessness and keeping quiet to let the lawsuit move forward. When I closed the computer I was left wondering what a movie could do there, although in short they were being able to talk beyond the wall.
Another time, I had to go to a women’s prison within the framework of the Tandil Film Festival. They set up the screen thanks to the Institute’s Mobile Cinema and the performance began. The girls shared the mate and chatted, every now and then one of them would laugh or laugh. When the screening ended we made a round and the word began to emerge: the abortions they suffered, the children they missed, the violence, the blood. We cried a lot that time. I remember two girls hugging and kissing each other: one of them said that they loved each other and were going to get married. Before saying goodbye they asked us for more movies, but they wanted to choose what to watch. I was shocked, the bars closed behind me, further and further away from them.
Our cinema law dictates that a National Cinematography must be promoted in its cultural, artistic, technical and industrial value. We are not just talking about film production, but about everything that cinema and audiovisuals can circulate in society. Cinematography are the films that my grandmother watched when she was a child and that we are losing, despite the commitment of INCAA workers who try to preserve each recovered can of film, because we lack a National Cinematheque. Cinematography is every debate in every film school, it is the students and all generations. The National Cinematography is put together every day with each ticket that is sold or each play that is pressed on the screens, because the films end when someone sees them at home, in a school, in movie theaters around the world. , in indigenous communities, in prisons.
Whoever is in charge of INCAA today despises National Cinematography and is leading it to its ruin. Allied to a Government that censors the plurality of stories and that with its aggressiveness and hatred pushes us to the darkest places that the history of our country has ever reached, I wonder what we do with our pain in the face of its incompetence to promote a culture of love
* Filmmaker, director of kid squirt (2016), Girl mom (2019) y The long night of Francisco Sanctis (2017), co-directed with Francisco Márquez, which competed at Cannes. He is a member of the Collective of Filmmakers group.