Clarisa Navas's One in a Thousand is exclusively showing on MUBI starting June 18, 2021 in many countries in The New Auteurs series.
"Las Mil," located in Corrientes, a province at Argentina’s northeast, is the name of the neighbourhood where I grew up and where I experienced many of the situations that happen in the film. But these are not only my own personal stories, they are also experiences of the people who made the film with me.
When I was a teenager and I wrote in a notebook the things that happened to me, making fiction worked to illuminate a context that was otherwise very sad.
At that time, The World seemed to squeeze my heart and say that many things would not be possible. Sometimes an encounter with another person saves your life, changes the way you think and feel. Between those aisles and faint lights, one of the greatest loves occurred among intense moments of adrenaline, like those that make you remember that you are alive.
One in a Thousand is an attempt to create a new existential territory that devises other horizons from the rubble that has fallen on us and from which we have to make room for ourselves. What can you do when faced with a context that tells you that you won't be able to live in a certain way? What can you do or what is left for someone when their manner of existence is brought under question? For me, these images are set up against this violence, against the countless images of marginality that only aestheticize precariousness.
That's why, together with the team with which we made this film, we believe in constructing other kinds of images that resist against the torrent of exterminating information and violence. Images that perhaps restore a certain belief in the present, even in the midst of these architectures that were forgotten decades ago, where some people planned the living conditions for others in a miserable way.
The neighbourhood is built with sequence shots that weave a web of forces in constant movement. A network that is built between the things of the neighbourhood, between the shouts and the dogs that pass by. These are reduced images that try not to see beyond what you could see when you actually live there. Because one never sees in a wide-angle lens, for example. One sees in fragments, in pieces. In that perspective, one sees with what one can, with whatever one has been shaped by living there. In the film, the images try to be assembled in this way, from what can be seen and heard while being inside, resisting the vocation to objectify, which is always implied in making images from a distance.
Working with the actors, who are natives of the northeastern region of Argentina, was a long process of constructing a sensitive plot. Most of them are people who have been through similar situations in real life, and their bodies have not forgotten that. From that place we began to work on the building of a presence. To be able to be present is the most difficult thing. It requires a body and to have a body nowadays, a singular body, is very difficult with so many things that make us absent and discourses that swallow us up and erase us. The task then was to recover the small gestures, to focus there more than on the words. And for that we needed time, shots and sequences that are not cut and enable small actions to emerge. Temporalities that are not only a function of a plot, but that allow precisely "a state of being" and that anything can happen between those bodies. Times that break out of colonial functionality and open up to other directions.
Beyond these thoughts, what is certain is that One in a Thousand was made in the neighbourhood and with the neighbourhood. I remember one day after I finished filming, I was buying vegetables in a nearby shop and a guy who was attending asked me:
"What is the film about? Is it about drugs or about robberies?"
And I asked him why he had thought that.
And he answered me:
"What else can you be filming about here?"
I answered:
"It has to do with love."
I think my answer was a bit simple, but in the confrontation with hostile environments, perhaps all we can do is take refuge and embrace each other to make life more livable.
In all this time of pandemic and confinement, I often ask myself what is the power of cinema or why make films. I think some days I find more answers than others. For the time being, I feel that many times a film is like a little bottle thrown into the sea, a throw, a possibility too. It's like the letter Iris gives Renata, an invitation to dare to play, to open life in another direction. In these times when risks become so frightening, the gestures of these characters remind me that it is only possible to survive together with other people and that somehow the way to recover one’s body is through encounters with others.
