Pin de Fartie (Alejo Moguillansky, 2025).
At a time when so many films to come out of the festival circuit seem bound by the same storytelling and aesthetic conventions, to venture into the cinema of Alejo Moguillansky is to experience an electrifying cognitive dissonance. Independently produced by El Pampero Cine—the collective he founded in 2002 with Laura Citarella, Agustín Mendilaharzu, and Mariano Llinás—and often starring his partner Luciana Acuña and daughter Cleo, Moguillansky’s films double as games you do not watch but play. Even so, nothing about them is ever accidental or aleatoric. Swapping linear plots for more shapeshifting narratives, powered not by conflict but repetition and temporal disruption, his films radiate a boisterous freedom and insouciant disregard for rules. They bring preexisting texts—Castro (2009) borrows from Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, The Parrot and the Swan (2013) from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, The Little Match Girl (2017) from Hans Christian Andersen’s short story—into conversation with other fictions in the films’ own worlds.
Like its predecessors, Pin de Fartie is an unfaithful adaptation. The film uses Beckett’s 1957 Endgame—a one-set, one-act play in which a handful of characters bicker about the apocalypse—as an excuse to follow a few drifters trying to bring it to life. In the first storyline, a despotic blind man (Santiago Gobernori) fritters away time at a Swiss lakeside retreat arguing with a young girl (Cleo Moguillansky). As Pin de Fartie bolts back to Buenos Aires, the distance from Endgame itself grows greater, even as the text is ever close at hand. In the second storyline, Moguillansky tracks two actors (Laura Paredes and Marcos Ferrante) as they meet and fall in love over weekly rehearsals of the play; in the third, he casts himself as a son reading it to his blind mother (Margarita Fernández). Two omniscient narrators—Luciana Acuña and composer Maxi Prietto—sing ballads that comment on the proceedings. Behind the scenes, we find two crew members (cinematographers Inés Duacastella and Ana Roy) at work.
Pin de Fartie restlessly dances between its nested stories, interspersing the action, such as it is, with glimpses of Beckett’s physical text, lines of dialogue underscored with a pencil in the rhythm with which they might be delivered. When we spoke, Moguillansky said he wanted to capture literature “in its complete materiality,” as if it were “its own independent thing,” and he affords the same respect to music and theater. As his character’s mother plays Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, the camera studies her hands tickling the keys in a protracted, unbroken shot. It evinces the same curiosity with which Moguillansky follows the two actors as they transform into Beckett’s characters and travel between the play’s fictional world and the film’s own. Cinema has long been thought of as the synthesis of the other arts; Pin de Fartie treats each as a distinct realm, and concerns itself instead with what can come out of their clash.
The film represents something increasingly hard to come by in both mainstream and arthouse cinema: the audacity to experiment with genre and form. It also exemplifies the director’s use of repetitions and variations. Paredes and Ferrante meet four times for their late-night rehearsals, and their rendezvous follow the same structure, but each small tweak in their interactions—the way they smile at each other on the way to the flat, the heavier silences that punctuate their exchanges—intimates seismic emotional shifts. As befits a story that unfurls as a series of farewells, Pin de Fartie is shot through with deep melancholy, a tonal departure that makes this one of Moguillansky’s most moving works.
The day after Pin de Fartie premiered in Venice, Moguillansky and I sat to discuss the serendipitous production, his efforts to stage an encounter between cinema and other media, and the conspiratorial quality of his characters and collaborations.
Pin de Fartie (Alejo Moguillansky, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: Your previous Beckett adaptation, Castro, was the last film you made for which a full script was written before shooting—all your subsequent projects involved a great deal of writing in the course of production. How did the writing process unfold in Pin de Fartie?
ALEJO MOGUILLANSKY: I don’t think it was all that different from the films I made since Castro. The idea began while I was in Lausanne, Switzerland, teaching at the ÉCAL [University of Art and Design]. I’d spent a few months living on the shores of Lake Léman, and hadn’t managed to film anything, which was starting to feel like an emergency situation. When we finally began to shoot, it was all quite anarchic. I was there with Luciana [Acuña] and my daughter, Cleo. We brought in Santiago Gobernori, who had just been working on a project with Luciana in Heidelberg, and our cinematographer, Tebbe [Schöning]. We didn’t set out to shoot Endgame but what you saw in the film, which strikes me less as an adaptation than an anagram, a game of variations. In the end I think all that Pin de Fartie retains of Beckett’s play is this choreography of a farewell between two people who will never see each other again, which was very emotional for me, for various reasons. On the one hand, I felt as though we were bidding farewell to a girl’s childhood—my own daughter’s! On the other, I was saying goodbye to my country, Argentina. I reached Switzerland the day Javier Milei was sworn in as president, and while mine wasn’t an exile, technically—I’d gone to Europe for work and would return in a few months—I remember feeling as though something had ended. The character played by Gobernori is blind, and his condition also suggested a farewell to the visible world. And finally, there was this idea of a goodbye to cinema itself. We’re always worrying about the death of cinema and how we should resuscitate it, which I think is what Pampero Cine has tried to do since its inception. And the idea that one is always bidding farewell to cinema while trying to resurrect it was itself very Beckettian: to die and to be born again, as in a vicious circle where birth and decay are one and the same thing. It all made sense to me. Parallel to that, we came up with all the variations and doubles. Several people say goodbye to each other in Pin de Fartie: a mother to her son, a father to his daughter, two actors who’ll never work [together] again but create something magical whenever they do. I’m well aware that the film is quite melancholic; this is the first time we don’t make a comedy but something closer to a tragedy. It’s a different register altogether. Pin de Fartie is a lot sadder than our previous [films], but so are the times we live in. I suppose this is our way of being contemporary.
NOTEBOOK: There’s a serendipitous quality to Pin de Fartie that made me feel as though the film was discovering itself as we watched. Case in point: when you suddenly realize Swiss tennis star Stan Wawrinka, whom a character says you resemble, has a Beckett quote tattooed on his arm.
MOGUILLANSKY: Oh, but the tattoo is real!
NOTEBOOK: I know, but it still feels like a totally unexpected and organic epiphany, something that you seem to come upon with the rest of us.
MOGUILLANSKY: That’s because the film isn’t static—it keeps on growing. It has a few dramatic centers but it stretches outward, arborising itself into new spirals. The tattoo is real, as is the fact that people call me Wawrinka—I play tennis twice or thrice a week. It was a connection that felt a little magical, an inside joke. Wawrinka, the Congress Square in Buenos Aires… Pin de Fartie tries to incorporate elements that have specific roles and meanings in the real world, and arrange them all into a music that’s very crepuscular and has a high poetic density. That’s why I think the film works very honestly. There’s no script, or rather, there’s an a posteriori script that we assembled in the cutting room. As soon as we had a tentative draft, I sat down with Mariano [Llinás] and together we wrote down a lot of literature around Pin de Fartie. But that literature enters the film as literature. Like Beethoven’s music, or Beckett’s play, it comes from outside the film’s world, and there’s no effort to mask it into something different; it’s treated as its own separate thing. It’s as if Pin de Fartie was a kind of bucket in which many things coalesce: Beckett, Beethoven, my own family, and the other actors, whom the film is madly in love with and captures as they move in and out of their fictional worlds. Sure, things like Endgame and Moonlight Sonata function as road maps. But the film itself tries to conjure a tragic, crepuscular sensibility. An era is coming to an end, and we don’t quite know what the next one will look like.
Pin de Fartie (Alejo Moguillansky, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: I wonder if this desire to film literature as its own separate thing accounts for why you decided to include shots of Beckett’s physical text. Time and again we see a hand highlighting words from the play, lines that no one in the film utters but we get to read on the page. It made me think of Matías Piñeiro’s You Burn Me (2024), another film that’s interested in the materiality of its source texts.
MOGUILLANSKY: Did you ever come across André Bazin’s essay on Jean Renoir’s attempts to film theater?1 He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that theater must be filmed in its own frame and context. That in order for there to be a real montage between the distinct languages of cinema and theater, in order for there to be a friction between the two, you have to distance yourself and shoot theater from the armchair, so to speak. With Pin de Fartie, we didn’t want to make a literary film, but to film literature in its complete materiality—and do the same with theater and music, too. We wanted to use the tools of cinema to escape the medium and fashion a different language altogether. But to do this you need some distance; you need to understand the kind of resistance that comes when two distinct idioms clash. In the end, much of that transpires from the editing, and Pin de Fartie—with all its doubles and crisscrossing storylines—was a work of montage. Matías and I share many of these ideas, and we both feel as though our films at some point swapped our usual pans for shots of pens and pencils underscoring words. We promised each other never to film an annotated book page again—enough! [Laughs.]
NOTEBOOK: Could you speak about the role that repetitions play in the film? I was thinking about Laura Paredes’s and Marcos Ferrante’s characters, and their weekly late-night rehearsals. There’s a certain formula to these rendezvous, but the repetitions never overwhelm the film, and every small variation suggests seismic emotional changes.
MOGUILLANSKY: Well, I’m happy to hear that. But I think that has to do with the film’s musicality. I have a musical way of thinking about cinema, and I suppose you could think of my films as inviting you to play games of different speeds. Your speed versus my speed, say, or the speed of a phone versus the speed of someone’s voice. After all, repetitions and variations are musical terms, and I’ve constantly used them in my cinema. That said, Pin de Fartie is quite different from my previous works; where those [films] tend to increase their velocity as they unfurl, here the speed is almost close to zero. It’s a much slower film, and it tries its best to decelerate until it basically grinds to a halt. The way I see it, Pin de Fartie suggests that it’s impossible to stop walking, and tragically trudges on itself. That’s the film’s sensibility.
NOTEBOOK: But how do you stage these repetitions and variations, in practical terms? Going back to those weekly rehearsals, how did those small changes in the actors’ routine emerge? Were they all written out in the script or did they come out organically from Paredes and Ferrante’s performances?
MOGUILLANSKY: We shot those scenes with Laura and Marcos over a few nights—two for the exteriors and another two for the interiors. And we rehearsed lots. At first the idea was just to film some readings, but Marcos was adamant that he wanted to rehearse for those, too. So we started to prepare and then filmed until we managed to find a kind of grace, humor, and eroticism to each rendezvous. Marcos and Laura only appear in four scenes, and it’s almost like watching a melodrama: they meet, fall in love, prepare to break up, and part ways. But what we were looking for within that melodramatic arc was the moment acting allowed these two lovers to move in between worlds. We wanted to watch an actor transform into somebody else, and then return to their original form, and do that over and over again. The more I think about it the more the film seems to me to be more concerned with that process than anything else: the journey through which a person becomes something other than themselves. It’s the same thing that happens when we turn to the pianist playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and a traveling shot singles out her hands on the keys. Or when a character transforms as they engage with someone from a different age. It’s something that borders on the religious, and it’s because the film treats these professions—the actor, the musician, the filmmaker—as if they were mystical exercises.
Pin de Fartie (Alejo Moguillansky, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: Halfway through those late-night rehearsals, an omniscient narrator says the two actors “enter and leave fictions as if they were spies.” That’s not the first time your characters are compared to shady figures—when they don’t commit actual crimes! I’d love to hear more about this conspiratorial quality of your cinema.
MOGUILLANSKY: Well, if you really want to create something new, you have to disobey; if you want to create a new tradition, you have to escape from the old ones. I do not mean destroy but break free from them. Once you look at my films in this light, you might take them as a celebration of disobedience, a tribute to some subversive lifestyles, and a reminder that artists—if they choose not to do what people expect them to—are always criminals. I like to think that my films, and all those that have come out of Pampero Cine, do not conform to what people might expect from them or peddle the kind of ideas that would make them politically correct—or incorrect. They do not explicitly talk about politics, but wind up creating their own, encouraging viewers to think critically about the political economy of filmmaking as opposed to embracing this or that partisan view on some hot-button issues.
NOTEBOOK: That sounds quite utopian.
MOGUILLANKSY: Maybe. But I think that Pampero Cine—sometimes tacitly, other times more explicitly—champions that kind of ethos. If there’s anything we’d all give our life for, that’s cinema, and in that sense the medium for us is a kind of motherland, a ship from where we can see the world. Even when our films are not about topical issues, I like to think they’re as contemporary as they can be.
NOTEBOOK: Is that why yours so often double as chronicles of their own making? Like its predecessors, Pin de Fartie includes a few behind-the-scenes shots of two crew members filming things and recreating sounds through Foley work.
MOGUILLANSKY: Well, in a film that’s so steeped in theater and music, it felt a little strange not to include cinema as its own planet. The two women you see in those behind-the-scenes sequences are Inés [Duacastella] and Ana [Roy], who served as cinematographers together with Tebbe; he shot the scenes in Switzerland, they worked in Argentina. We spent several weeks shooting Inés and Ana at work, watching them as they recreated visuals and sounds for the film. Moons, miniature trains, storms, Foley work of water and planes. And the faker those things seemed, the truer they were, and the greater their poetic intensity on the screen. Like the moment when Laura glances at the moon from inside the flat where she’s rehearsing; that moon was one of the several things Inés and Ana recreated, and it’s all the more emotional for being artificial.
Pin de Fartie (Alejo Moguillansky, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: I like how you refrain from naming some of the film’s locations. Flags and landmarks make it abundantly clear we’re in Switzerland and Argentina, but the former is only referred to as “a neutral hell”, while the latter is the “Southern Motherland”. Why those omissions?
MOGUILLANSKY: That’s something I borrowed from fantasy fiction. The film names something without actually naming it, and in the process transforms it. I think it has to do with the fantastical tradition from Mar del Plata, specifically. Remember Invasión [1969], by Hugo Santiago? Aquileia, the fictional city at that film’s center, was obviously Buenos Aires; the film is fiction, but at the same time, a documentary. You see a place that might seem familiar but it’s still embedded in a fictional realm. It’s like Godard’s adage: If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and vice versa. That game of Chinese boxes can go on forever—it’s a cyclical relationship. And I think that’s the dynamic fueling Pin de Fartie. But there was also something interesting about the friction between that “neutral” place and the idea of motherland. You can apply the term to Argentina, France—even cinema! But it’s trickier to think of a country as fragmented as Switzerland as a motherland. Swiss nationalism strikes me as a kind of paradox, and that’s what intrigued us so much about the place: It’s a country that’s not a nation. In the film, characters refer to Argentina as Patria del Sur [Southern Motherland], and France as Fin de Patrie [Motherland’s End], but Switzerland just can’t be called. It has no name.
NOTEBOOK: Your works often rely on omniscient narrators to chaperone us into their worlds. In Pin de Fartie, that onus is on your partner, Luciana Acuña, and the film’s composer, Maxi Prietto, who sings ballads that double as commentary on the proceedings. Did you write those songs yourself?
MOGUILLANSKY: I wrote the lyrics, yes, some with Mariano [Llinás]. Several with Mariano, actually. Maxi worked on the other tracks. Like “Viene Arrastrandose,” which you hear during that traveling shot that follows Cleo and Santiago as they stroll by Lake Léman. All I told Maxi was, “Give me a farewell song, and make sure the chorus says viene arrastrandose” [“it comes crawling”]. As for the very final song, “Socorro,” that’s a cover of a tune by Arnaldo Antunes, a Brazilian composer. I think Maxi did a magnificent job.
NOTEBOOK: This is not the first time you’ve worked with your own family, and I’d be curious to hear more about your experience directing Cleo especially.
MOGUILLANSKY: It’s always been very organic. I guess the child of a shoemaker will find it naturally easy to make shoes; and the child of a filmmaker will find it easy to make films. Generally speaking, I think directors make good actors. Cleo grew up between shoots, dance, and theater rehearsals; she’s part of that world, and knows how to handle it and create things on her own. She can act, yes, but she can also pull focus and record sound. If she wanted to make a movie herself, I’m pretty sure she’d manage. Things were a little different in Pin de Fartie because the text was more complex and it involved a stranger degree of depersonalization. But I think she’s a good actress.
NOTEBOOK: She is. And the reason I asked is because, to go back to what you said at the start, Pin de Fartie is a film of many farewells, and I wonder how you must have felt while staging a goodbye between a father and his daughter.
MOGUILLANSKY: Terrified! [Laughs.] I find the film to be very cathartic, and not just with regards to Cleo. But the end of your kid’s childhood… It's a very strange moment. Watching as your daughter stops being a girl and grows into an adult can be really quite moving. And I wanted Pin de Fartie to serve as a kind of documentary of that moment. We end the film without knowing whether she’ll keep on acting with us. I suppose she will, and I think she wants to. I hope so, at least. But there are other forces at play now.
- André Bazin, “Renoir and the Theater,” Jean Renoir (W. H. Allen, 1974), 120–28. ↩