Rodrigo Moreno, the Argentine filmmaker who seeks freedom through cinema

Morán, one of the two protagonists of the Argentine film

Los criminales

(2023), is tired of the monotony of his life as a banker.

Fed up with dedicating eight hours a day to a multimillion-dollar company for a mediocre salary as treasurer, he devises a plan: he will rob the bank, hide the money, turn himself in to the police and after spending a few years in prison, he will never work again.

“Three and a half years in jail or 25 in the bank?” he asks his partner in crime.

With his latest film, filmmaker Rodrigo Moreno (Buenos Aires, 51 years old) – to whom Casa de América dedicates a retrospective in March and April – asks again if freedom can be called being another cog in a structure that rewards productivity. and effectiveness.

Another story in his filmography occupied by peripheral characters who wake up from a long lethargy and throw themselves into the uncertain.

“

The Criminals

talks about the search for freedom, but also about my own freedom as a filmmaker,” says Moreno in one of the rooms of the Linares Palace, headquarters of Casa América.

The film, available on Filmin, has been described by critics as one of the best productions of Argentine cinema in recent years.

It premiered at the last Cannes festival, and has passed through San Sebastian, New York and Toronto, and will be released in 30 countries, including France, Italy and the United Kingdom.

“It has connected well because it reflects the post-pandemic world, where work became the total center of our existence, where the idea of ​​productivity and money are almost the only way to measure anything you do in life.

"If it gives money or it doesn't give money."

More information

'The Delinquents': a robbery film sculpted in the time of calm

Cannes rejected Moreno's previous films and waited until his seventh feature film (fifth solo) to finally accept a production of his.

However, his hallmarks have not changed: in his work there have always been characters who struggle between productive and unproductive time, leisure and homework, obligation and satisfaction, freedom and dependence. .

If in

The Criminals

, inspired by the classic

Hardly a Criminal

(1949), there are two bankers who face these issues, in

The Custodian

(2006) he is the bodyguard of a minister whose life is limited to being the shadow of a politician. , and in

A Mysterious World

(2011) - both were part of the official selection of the Berlinale - he is a thirty-something whose wife has just left him and he must leave home to enter a world with new hobbies, companions and hookups.

The actors Daniel Elías, as Morán, and Margarita Molfino, as Norma in 'Los criminales'.Casa de América

“He is a filmmaker who addresses, from unconventional or obvious perspectives, class differences, labor abuses, the use of time, freedom,” summarizes the Argentine film critic and director of the digital magazine Otro Cines

,

Diego Batlle.

Reimon

(2014) is the film by Moreno where the criticism of the labor system is most explicit.

The film, about a domestic worker who must travel 30 kilometers by public transport every day to get to her work, begins by detailing how much it cost to produce the film, the hours that were invested in it and how the team's salary was paid.

“He is clearly a questioner of the most savage capitalism, exposing the contradictions, exploitation and how it generates mechanisms such as revenge and guilt,” Batlle continues.

Moreno also has his own search for freedom, that of being able to make authorial and countercultural cinema.

It has been difficult for him to finance his projects -

The Delinquents

was supposed to be filmed in one year and there ended up being six - precisely because he was not concessional with the massive aspirations of the production companies.

“My films carry an idea of ​​rebellion, not only of the characters who decide to change their destiny, but also against the predictable areas that contemporary cinema reproduces in quantity,” says the director.

His ways of narrating are particular: many interior scenes, people doing everyday things (eating breakfast, combing their hair, reading, waking up), few dialogues, fixed shots that capture the inconsequential or absurd humor.

The “foreseeable areas” that the Buenos Aires native speaks of are the attempts to emulate the profitable style of the platforms.

“It's incredible how series that wanted to look like movies have managed to make movies want to look like them.”

In that attempt to look for alternatives to the “tax view” of

streaming

– as defined by

The New Yorker

critic Richard Brody – Moreno became his own producer since his second individual film,

Un mundo mysterious

.

“When I think about a movie, I don't just think about the story, but about how I want to film it, under what conditions, and those are production decisions.

"I don't like shooting night scenes, so my scripts aren't going to have them."

In addition to directing and producing his films, he also writes and edits them.

Marcela Días, in an image from 'Reimon' (2014).Casa de América

As a total author, control over interpretation could not be lacking.

Moreno likes to repeat his actors.

“I love that they are being forged like a troop,” he says and mentions as examples Jean-Pierre Léaud with Truffaut, Matti Pellonpää with Aki Kaurismäki or De Niro with Scorsese.

His troupe is made up of Cecilia Rainero, Germán de Silva and mainly Esteban Bigliardi, with fundamental roles in his last three films.

The interpreter, who acted in

The Snow Society

when the filming of

The Criminals

was stopped, tells EL PAÍS that he met Moreno when the filmmaker went to see him 15 years ago at the Callejón theater, in the play

Something makes noise

.

“The generation of Rodrigo, Lucrecia Martel, Lisandro Alonso and Santiago Miter was always very curious about what was happening in the theater.

Before them, cinema was divorced from the stage in Argentina.”

That theatrical work, inspired by the story

La intrusa,

by Jorge Luis Borges, not only meant the genesis of the collaboration between Moreno and Bigliardi, but also a decisive point of the movement known as the New Argentine Cinema.

The other actors in the piece, Esteban Lamothe and Pilar Gamboa, would end up being the protagonists of

The student

(2011), by Mitre, and

La flor

(2018), by

Mariano Llinás, respectively.

The founding of the Argentine Cinema University in 1991 coincided with the new film law of 1994 that promoted national production through promotions and public policies.

From that moment, to which is added the arrival of digital, are the children of a wave of filmmakers of which Moreno is one of its founders.

“Trapero and Llinás came to have their own production companies and have sought a more industrial model in the case of the former.

Rodrigo is a bit the other way around, he started with Julio Chavez [protagonist of

El custodio

] who was at a moment of popularity and then he went to a more independent model, looking for his own voice," says one of the authors of the book

The New Argentine Cinema

(2002) and director Sergio Wolf.

He highlights that the group was a reaction to the Rio de la Plata cinema of the 1980s, and that they opted for a cinephile training giving films of the stature of

Nine Queens

(Fabian Bielinsky, 2000),

La ciénaga

(Lucrecia Martel, 2001) or

Minimum Stories

(Carlos Sorin, 2002).

Esteban Bigliardi, in an image from 'A mysterious world'.Casa de América

The Milei threat

A summit of Argentine cinema that is now threatened by the radical policies of President Javier Milei.

Within his plan to dismantle the State, the politician who defines himself as an anarcho-capitalist announced on Monday, March 11, through the Official Gazette, a series of cuts to the National Institute of Art and Cinema (INCAA) that includes the “non-renewal of contracts, the cutting of financing for festivals and budget restrictions.”

“With this reform I would not have been able to make

The Criminals

.

It was not private capital that allowed the film to be made, but rather the public policies of each of the countries that produced it,” Moreno confesses.

The argument used by the Government is to “rationalize resources” and that the INCAA “is not self-sustaining.”

“We should not put cinema in terms of that infamous productivity that belongs to companies.

The expense it represents for the Argentine State is very little in relation to what is generated.

With a shoot you circulate the economy in a different way: you film in a town and for two months they live off the 100 people who are settled there.

In addition to what it means to have your own cinematography, I can know a lot about Iran because I know Abbas Kiarostami or Jafar Panahi,” Moreno responds.

One of the consequences, he says, will be the drastic reduction of audiovisual production and markets.

The Filmmakers Collective organization has already announced that at least four months of inactivity are expected.

Of course, less will be created, but it will not stop being created: “If Rossellini filmed during the war, what is stopping us?”

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