ALEJO MOGUILLANSKY

AFI Fest 2025

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Originally published on Ink19 on November 3rd, 2025

AFI Fest 2025
Los Angeles, California • October 22-26, 2025

For us, no fall is complete without reviewing the wildly eclectic offerings of the American Film Institute’s five-day festival that annually takes over the TCL Chinese Theatres on Hollywood Boulevard.

Every October, for five days and nights, AFI Fest presents some of the finest shorts and features drawn from the year’s prominent film festivals and pairs them with star-studded Hollywood premieres and first-time offerings. Over the last eleven years, we have frantically caught everything that we could during the fest and presented you with our capsule reviews of our favorite watches.

This year, we carefully selected 17 feature films to watch from the over 161 films in a stellar program comprised of 7 Red Carpet Premieres, 12 Special Screenings, 14 Luminaries selections, 15 Discovery films, 20 World Cinema selections, 15 Documentaries, 6 After Dark titles, 44 Short films, and 23 films from the AFI Conservatory Showcase! As has been the case in previous years at AFI Fest, the majority of our picks this year were drawn from the Luminaries, World Cinema, Documentary, and Discovery sections. Another strategy for us, especially given the larger than ever amount of programming offered, was to avoid films that already had scheduled nationwide releases for shortly after the festival, which allowed us to conserve our time for those that most likely wouldn’t make it to US theaters until 2026.

Mixed into the offerings were 19 Best International Feature Oscar® submissions, and we are thankful that we had the chance to see several of them, including Simón Mesa Soto’s accomplished second feature, Un Poeta (A Poet), from Colombia, Igor Bezinović’s innovative hybrid-documentary, Fiume o morte! (Rijeka or death!), and Jeunes mères (Young Mothers), another in a long line of social realist masterworks from the Dardenne Brothers representing Belgium, all three of which we have reviewed for you below along with five other films that we admire, beginning with our favorite from this year’s festival.

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Pin De Fartie

dir Alejo Moguillansky / Argentina

A film of variations, Pin de Fartie projects, stretches, and morphs the acts of viewing and storytelling inherent in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (Fin de Partie) to form a vital dialog about filmmaking itself. In the sections closest to Beckett’s play, a girl (portrayed by director Alejo Moguillansky’s daughter and regular collaborator Cleo Moguillansky) serves as a weary caretaker to a demanding blind man (Santiago Gobernori). We also watch two silent and unnamed filmmakers creating sounds and models for the film we’re actively viewing, two actors rehearsing Endgame and falling in and out of their characters and their emerging romance, a mother and son reading Endgame and aligning their reality with the fiction, and a couple living in a large garbage bin somewhere in Buenos Aires. Interspliced between these various storylines, a woman (Luciana Acuña, Moguillansky’s wife and creative partner) provides connective narration alongside a musician (Maxi Prietto) who sings the sentiments and themes of each scenario. And, to top it all off, we view glimpses of the director’s hand underlining key passages in a printed copy of Endgame. Pin de Fartie brings together literature, music, and cinema, allowing the three to share the stage of the frame and communicate with each other. From their intertwining, Moguillansky reveals the magic of film as the conduit that can incorporate each artform’s strengths to bring us to new truths. A work ever moving towards farewells, Pin de Fartie has a mournful tone for what has been and what will be lost in each of its stories and in our overall zeitgeist, but rejoices in the endurance and infinite possibilities of the moving image and encourages us to place our hope there. A work that reaffirms El Pampero Cine’s standing as one of the most significant filmmaking collectives in the world, Pin de Fartie is a culmination of Moguillansky’s innovative, spirited, and collaborative methods of cinema and perfectly represents the ethos of the collective he co-founded. We had the privilege of speaking with director Alejo Moguillansky prior to the festival, and that conversation is available here.

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Geu jayeoni nege mworago hani (What Does That Nature Say To You)

dir Hong Sangsoo / South Korea

When we think of Hong Sangsoo’s films, we first recall his consistent tools for filmmaking: his regular players, particularly Kim Minhee and Kwon Haehyo, alcohol (often in soju or makgeolli form), cigarettes, and an artist protagonist. In reflecting on some of our favorite films of Hong, we recognize another common device — a painfully uncomfortable, embarrassing, and awkward confrontation. In 2024’s A Traveler’s Needs, the cringing point arrives when the mother of poet In-guk histrionically questions the young man’s reasons for allowing a French stranger (Isabelle Huppert) to live with him. In 2015’s Right Now, Wrong Then, it appears when the painter (Kim Minhee) awakens the director (Jung Jaeyoung) from his drunken sleep and proceeds to berate him after she learns about his reputation of disingenuousness. And in Hong’s latest, What Does That Nature Say To You, a genteel drinking challenge generates one of the most tortuous outbursts we’ve ever seen in a Hong Sangsoo film. What Does That Nature Say To You captures a single day for thirty-something poet Donghwa (Ha Seongguk). It all begins innocently enough: Donghwa drives his girlfriend Junhee (Kang Soyi) to her family home in Yeoju. He plans to drop her off and return immediately back to Seoul, but when he pulls up the driveway, Junhee’s father (Kwon Haehyo) is outside and insists that Donghwa stay for dinner. This naturally forces Donghwa to meet all of Junhee’s family for the first time, and they seize the opportunity to learn more about the boyfriend they’ve heard about for the past few years. Junhee’s sister (Park Miso) fixates on Donghwa’s esteemed attorney father and repeatedly prods to try to understand how much of his wealth has landed on Donghwa. Junhee’s father gives him a tour of the lush grounds of the family home originally built for Junhee’s grandmother, and in the process, quietly tests for Donghwa’s intentions with his daughter as well as his capacity to feel. Then, once she arrives home from work, Junhee’s mother (Cho Yunhee) makes a feast for everyone and proceeds to inquire about Donghwa’s poetry. Throughout the meal, Donghwa is gracious, complementary, respectful, and incredibly thoughtful in his comments around the mother’s poetry and the father’s landscaping talents. The parents meanwhile appear as good hosts, but in between smiles and then eventually drinks poured non-stop by Junhee’s father, they reveal their skepticism about Donghwa’s attempts to be independent, his philosophy for simple living, and his talent as a poet. After an intoxicated recitation of one of his poems and a modest criticism from Junhee’s sister, Donghwa melts down, precipitating a sequence of brutal revelations. With What Does That Nature Say To You, Hong utilizes the typical family drama trope of meeting a child’s romantic partner for the first time to provoke challenging questions about how familial structures and economic viability erode artistic inspiration and pure intentions. Donghwa may not be a good poet, but his spirit is exemplary, and watching it get challenged throughout What Does That Nature Say To You makes this one of Hong’s more tragic films to date.

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Kontinental ‘25

dir Radu Jude / Romania

In the final scene of Rossellini’s neo-realist film, Europa ‘51, the namesake and quasi-inspiration for Radu Jude’s latest feature, a grief-stricken bourgeois wife of an American businessman, Irene Girard (Ingrid Bergman), now committed to a mental hospital, waves at the grateful destitute people she’s tried to help throughout her journey, and they proclaim her as a modern saint. Overwhelmed and rendered near catatonic by the unexpected suicide of her young son in the film’s first quarter, Irene’s journey in Europa ‘51 begins as a serendipitous clandestine mission outside of any faith or political agenda to help everyone she encounters as a method to compensate for a life of tone-deafness towards all outside of her elite circle. For Irene, a walk through any post-war Roman neighborhood beyond her own provides an instant opportunity for a philanthropic effort, but can she really make any difference given the scale of misery around her at that time? The same question can be asked of Kontinental ‘25’s Orsolya (in an outstanding performance from Eszter Tompa), an ethnic Hungarian court bailiff in the city of Cluj, Romania, who, like Irene, is gobsmacked from the guilt of a suicide she feels responsible for — that of a homeless man who crudely hangs himself when she gives him a moment to collect his belongings while she is carrying out her court-appointed duty of evicting him from a squat. Like Rossellini’s Irene, Orsolya at first takes refuge in her bed, but as the story of the suicide becomes more public through partisan news reports, she must also confront the onslaught of online comments from people who not only show their hatred for her actions, but also seem to relish the opportunity to slam her Hungarian background, stressing that particular divide in the country. Now inconsolable, Orsolya decides to let her family vacation without her in Greece as she roams the streets of her city, telling everyone she can find, from her mother to a priest to a former student turned bike delivery person, about her sadness. She is rudderless, and as we would expect from a Jude film, her journey is a dark and absurdly comedic one that has Orsolya taking an almost opposite path of that of Irene’s that is more endemic of our time of constant meaningless input. Lost in her misery, she helps no one in her travels, opting instead to clumsily descend towards a debaucherous rock bottom to gain some sense of clarity. In many ways, but most importantly with its use of a flawed but empathic protagonist, Kontinental ‘25 is the logical next feature for Jude, whose immensely profound and utterly enjoyable gut punch from 2023, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, also utilized a film from the past in its structure as a contrasting force to aggressively jab at the pitfalls of the Romanian version of late-stage capitalism that sees profits over the best interests of its citizens, who, like Orsolya, are uncertain of the necessary philosophy to adopt to overcome.

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Fiume o morte! (Rijeka or death!)

dir Igor Bezinović / Croatia, Italy, Slovenia

This year marks the 106th anniversary of the unparalleled absurdity that was the siege and occupation of the Adriatic port of Fiume led by the eminent Italian poet, playwright, aristocrat, and army general Gabriele D’Annunzio. Angered that the city, which once had a substantial population of ethnic Italians, would be annexed by the then newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, D’Annunzio led a force of 186 “legionaries” from Ronchi in Italy to Fiume with the initial goal of reclaiming the former Roman province of Dalmatia for the new state of Italy. Once established in Fiume, these troops received reinforcements totalling over 2,500 men who were composed of Italian veterans of the Battles of the Isonzo and nationalists who subsequently forced the withdrawal of the Allied occupying forces there, leading to the establishment of the self-proclaimed state of the Reggenza Italiana del Carnaro, an event so audacious that it inspired the political leanings of a young Benito Mussolini. Now, as historically significant as all of this sounds on paper, a casual questioning of the current residents of Rijeka, Croatia (the former Fiume) garners only spotty recollections of this event, if any at all. Thus, in a salute to what Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” hometown director Igor Bezinović leads the people of Rijeka into recreating D’Annunzio’s invasion for his oddly entertaining, but thought-provoking hybrid documentary, Fiume o morte! Fittingly, as a method to reconstruct the event for this current era of media oversaturation to forever bind this part of the town’s history in the minds of locals, Bezinović recruited anyone willing to don the military regalia of the invading forces to play a part and opted as well to find an endless throng of bald-headed men to play the Duce himself. With our players in place, and with the ethos similar to that of D’Annunzio, who hired professional photographers and cinematographers back in 1919 to film his actions to appear more like an artistic rendezvous rather than a hard-fought military campaign, the proceeding filming by Bezinović and cinematographer Gregor Bozic matches note for note the grand splendor of the images that were once sent back to the Italian homeland, where D’Annunzio, already revered as a celebrated artist and war hero, would be lauded as a conquering ruler. These contemporary scenes filmed by Bezinović are matched with archival footage and photographs throughout Fiume o morte!, which at first feel whimsical as the locals jest while being costumed, but as the combined images segue to December of 1920, when the city’s bridges were destroyed and soldiers laid dead after the town was stormed by the Royal Italian Army, these merged scenes dramatically change the tone of the film to accentuate the fatuity of that dark moment in Rijeka’s past. That shift in tone hammers home the ultimate message inherent in Fiume o morte!: although few in Rijeka remember D’Annunzio’s occupation, elaborately staged and documented audacious acts perpetrated by a cult of personality have an eternally seductive power that survives in many figures of today.

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Jeunes mères (Young Mothers)

dirs Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne / Belgium, France

For many months before viewing Young Mothers, the newest feature from veteran social realist directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, we’ve had their work at the forefront of our minds as Émilie Dequenne, the bright star of the brothers’ Palme D’Or-winning feature from 1999, Rosetta, passed away at the age of 43 in March of this year. Dequenne deservedly picked up a Best Actress award at Cannes for her devastating performance as the titular character, the only child of an incapable alcoholic mother who ferociously scrapes out a meager existence while living in a despot trailer park. Rosetta, like many of the protagonists of the Dardennes’ films, is thrust into a role that would hobble many adults twice her age while still only a child herself. A similar predicament can be said of the women at the center of Young Mothers: Jessica (Babette Verbeek), Perla (Lucie Laruelle), Julia (Elsa Houben), and Ariane (Janaïna Halloy), an in-need group of teens with dramatically different backgrounds who have recently given birth or are expecting to and who all reside in a publicly funded center in the Belgian city of Liège that offers them forms of assistance as they transition into parenthood or opt to offer their children up for adoption. Visually structured to feel like a hybrid documentary, our protagonists were actually portrayed by non-professional actresses who triumph when they convey their emotional makeups every time the focus shifts to their plights in this rare ensemble piece from the Dardennes, who have, over their long careers, normally opted to concentrate their stories on one or two central characters. In fact, given the subject matter of Young Mothers, it is near impossible not to think of the brothers’ film from twenty years ago, L’Enfant, which centers on a young couple who are ill-prepared to raise a child and consequently make criminal decisions to attempt to improve their situation. But unlike the desperate nature and pace of L’Enfant and Rosetta, Young Mothers distinguishes itself in its ability to absorb the hard times experienced by its central characters through a complete picture of each of their struggles in conjunction with the support system of the group home that allows each of them to understand the options for their futures with some clarity. Although the outcome is far from a happy ending, this affecting and poignant feature presents a compelling positive shift in perspective for the Dardennes, who here illuminate a pathway for their characters that stems more from individual growth facilitated by community support and less from the survival instincts needed to overcome daily hardships that marked the predominance of their early work.

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Un Poeta (A Poet)

dir. Simón Mesa Soto / Colombia, Germany, Sweden

What a coincidence that the poet’s struggle lies at the heart of two of our favorite films from this year’s AFI Fest. And yet, it’s not a surprise in a time when expressive language, written for the mysterious and often indescribable moments and feelings of human existence, is declining, replaced by words generated from a massive corpora of all things online or, more frightfully, by a reductive language that seeks optimal superficial reaction with the fewest words and concepts. In Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet, Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios) has been battling for an extended period against the forces that led to our current state of language and unfortunately has continued to fail. Once a young and award-winning poet and notable professor, Oscar now spends his days and nights as a drunkard who lives at home with his elderly mother. He consistently avoids working on his next book and takes any opportunity he can to espouse the virtues of poetry and lionize his hero, the tragic poet José Asunción Silva. A constant disappointment and embarrassment to his family and colleagues, Oscar learns about his daughter’s upcoming college plans and consequent financial needs and wants to contribute, even though he’s unequipped to do much. So with the help of his sister, he begrudgingly takes a job as a high school teacher. During one of Oscar’s inebriated lectures attempting to explain poetry to his uninterested pupils, the students point out Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade) as the sole young poet in the class, and he’s moved by the natural talent and earnestness in her writings and drawings. Oscar attempts to mentor Yurlady and convinces his poet colleagues to accept her into their poetry school. And for the first time in many years, the community of poets who have long seen Oscar as a wayward stepchild are delighted by one of his actions. But quickly their motivations misalign with Oscar’s: instead of encouraging Yurlady to build on her voice, they immediately laser in on the political value of Yurlady, who comes from a very poor family, and put in place the machinations to create a star sociopolitical poet perfect for the appetite of European donors and sponsors. Though a satire of the commoditization and debasement of art as well as the suffering for art, A Poet maintains an impressive humanity carried by the man portraying Oscar, Ubeimar Rios, a non-professional actor who is actually a high school philosophy teacher in real life. Rios soaks the delusional high poet Oscar with electric feeling and lures us into Oscar’s self-aggrandizement, self-loathing, and self-pity without alienating the viewer. Undoubtedly, Oscar is frustrating, but Rios’s performance along with Simón Mesa Soto’s direction and script instill a peculiar kind of nobility and innocence in a character who, despite all of the disappointing elements of life, art, and society, continues to seek the beauty of unadulterated poetry rooted in the sanctity of words, unfeigned emotion, and sober self-examination.

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Sehnsucht in Sangerhausen (Phantoms of July)

dir Julian Radlmaier / Germany

How and why certain film titles receive entirely new names when they cross the Atlantic completely perplexes us. One case we frequently cite is Wim Wenders’s Im Lauf der Zeit: the title’s direct translation is something along the lines of “as time goes by,” but in the US, the film became known as Kings of the Road. We felt similarly confounded when we learned that Julian Radlmaier’s Sehnsucht in Sangerhausen translates directly to “longing in Sangerhausen,” an apt title given its examination through four different stories set in the eastern German town of Sangerhausen, all unified by the working person’s desire for an unspecified better life, a commonality that triumphs over time, nationality, and personal experience. However, in arriving to American audiences, the title somehow became Phantoms of July, which captures the slightly fantastical tone of the film, but completely erases the importance of the setting and the force that motivates the film’s characters. Please forgive us for the extended complaint, and let’s put aside concerns about the name because Phantoms of July ruminates on the isolation and yearning of workers with an impressive acuity and refreshing gentleness that deserves attention in this year’s AFI Fest wrap up. The film opens in the late 1700s in the home of the German aristocrat and famed romantic poet, Novalis, the author of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the story which introduced the blue flower as a symbol of longing for the Romantic movement. Instead of focusing on Novalis, Radlmaier points our attention to Novalis’s housemaid Lotte, who finds a strangely beautiful blue stone in a field one morning while fetching milk. Lotte later meets a vagabond performer who dreams of travelling to France, for he’s heard, “They cut off the necks of princes there. All people are now equal and live freely like birds.” Inspired by such a place, Lotte and the performer take a horse from Novalis and try to escape to the freer land, but don’t get there. Fast forward to the Sangerhausen of the 21st century where Ursula, Neda, and Sungnam strive to make a living. Ursula, a daughter of the town whose family has lived in the area for too many generations to count, works as an off-hours cleaner for a furniture depot and as a waitress for the cafe in the Sangerhausen’s famous rose gardens. Neda, an Iranian refugee, travels around the town with her arm in a sling from an unknown injury and records sterile and insincere commentary of the sights. A former filmmaker who studied with Iran’s greatest directors, she’s attempting to build a career as a travel influencer and struggling to make ends meet. And in the town square, Sungnam, donning a neck brace, offers tours in an aging powder blue van daily without any takers. The three don’t have any reason to interact with each other, but elements from their working lives coincidentally propel them towards each other and towards Sangerhausen’s history. Phantoms of July excels in understanding how class and status as immigrants create separations between people and how such divides can be breeding grounds for cruelty but also unity without overstating its purpose and intention. In fact, Phantoms of July has a light touch that reveals a mutual hope between its characters that enables them to have empathy for each other, an understanding that we desperately need now.

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The Ozu Diaries

dir Daniel Raim / USA

I (Generoso) owe an almost four-decades-overdue thanks to the clerk of a now defunct art video store off of South Street in Philadelphia who insisted that I couldn’t leave his shop without renting Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story. As a young cineaste who had only seen a few essential films by Kurosawa up to that point, including an unplanned screening of Ran during a rainstorm that I hold as a pivotal point in my development, I outwardly longed to view more Japanese cinema, which inspired the aforementioned rental challenge from the employee at the video store, who thankfully was always beyond eager to make an on-point recommendation. My subsequent viewing of Ozu’s film, despite the less-than-ideal quality of the VHS tape and my small television screen, affected me in a way that few films had, which led me to hunt for as many of Ozu’s other works that I could find on video at that time in the 1980s and to read whatever books and articles I could to help me understand why these films impacted me so profoundly. A trip to the downtown central library put Donald Petrie’s book, Ozu: His Life and Films, in my hands, and although I have read multiple pieces since, I am forever interested in delving deeper into Ozu’s biographical history and creative process. Fortunately, back in 2018 and 2019, director Daniel Raim, who clearly shares a similar passion for Ozu, created two short films that examined specific aspects of the creative underpinnings of the director: The Search for Ozu and Ozu and Noda. The former film delves into the inspirations and techniques that went into the visual composition of Ozu’s films, and the latter shorter piece takes a look at Ozu’s personal relationship and screenwriting partnership with Kogo Noda, which resulted in twenty-seven films over a thirty-five year period that ended with Ozu’s death in 1963. For his latest full-length documentary, The Ozu Diaries, Raim uses unprecedented access to Ozu’s personal journals to create a more intimate portrait of the director that spans from his earliest memories of his parents, through his experiences as a young filmmaker and a combat soldier, and into to his most private thoughts as a veteran director looking at his cinematic collaborators and close friends. Structurally, apart from an early scene in The Ozu Diaries where Ozu elucidates on his father’s death, Raim’s film follows a linear timeline and uses voiceovers that draw directly from Ozu’s writings, which are placed over an astonishing array of corresponding visuals of photos and segments from Ozu’s films that effectively draw you into Ozu’s mindset, creating a somber tone for the documentary, disrupted only by spliced in testimonies to Ozu from contemporary filmmakers, which do more to distract than add to the overall impact of the piece. Despite the inclusion of these talking heads, The Ozu Diaries successfully builds on Raim’s earlier shorts on Ozu while accomplishing its goal of offering insight into the filmmaker’s life to give any admirer of the director a deeper understanding of the possible motivations and inspirations behind the perspicacious and affecting choices that he made for the screen.

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All films were screened at AFI Fest 2025. We offer our thanks and congratulations to the staff and volunteers of AFI Fest for another excellent year of cinema and conversations, and we send a special thanks as always to Johanna Calderón-Dakin, Senior Publicity Associate for AFI Fest, who made our coverage possible.

Featured photo of Guest Artistic Director Guillermo del Toro at AFI FEST 2025 courtesy of AFI Fest.

https://fest.afi.com

Alejo Moguillansky

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Originally published on Ink19 on October 21, 2025

Interview conducted by Lily and Generoso on October 10, 2025

A polyglot of artistic languages and a keen observer of the evolving conditions of our reality, Alejo Moguillansky has built his directorial oeuvre on mixtures of permutations drawn from literature, music, cinema, dance, and the process of filmmaking itself. One of the co-founders of El Pampero Cine, the collective of renegade independent filmmakers responsible for some of the most innovative films from Argentina for over two decades, Moguillansky, as an editor, has worked on the predominance of the output of El Pampero Cine, including Mariano Llinás’s magnum opus, La Flor, and Laura Citarella’s renowned extended mystery, Trenque Lauquen. And outside of the collective, he has edited the films of fellow directors such as Matías Piñeiro, Santiago Mitre, and Hugo Santiago. In turn, it is no surprise that Moguillansky’s own films move and flow with a rhythm and jazz-like discipline in creating structure from a multitude of riffs only possible from the eyes and timing of a consummate editor.

In his latest feature, Pin de Fartie, Moguillansky selects Samuel Beckett’s Endgame for the base melody and provides three variations of it while also layering in passages that celebrate filmmaking, storytelling, and music. In the first variation, which stands as the closest to the source material, Cleo (played by the director’s daughter and longtime ensemble member Cleo Moguillansky) and Otto (Santiago Gobernori) live, contemplate, and bicker in the closing days of their complicated father-daughter and master-servant relationship. In the second variation, two actors (Laura Paredes and Marcos Ferrante) rehearse Endgame and vacillate between the harshness of their characters and their growing love for each other. In the third variation, a son (played by the director himself) and his blind elderly mother (the renowned pianist and regular collaborator Margarita Fernández) stop their daily ritual around piano performance and replace it with daily recitations of Endgame, illuminating the similarities between the piece and the relationship between the parent approaching the end of life and the adult child. Connecting these variations, co-director and longtime collaborator Luciana Acuña and composer Maxi Prietto provide a chorus built on narration and acoustic rock. To top it all off, Moguillansky gives us delightful interludes of cinematographers Inés Duacastella and Ana Roy at work making movie magic happen: producing the sound of planes overhead with a moving blow torch, creating the reflection of the moon in a pool of water, and manufacturing the sound of waves on rocks within a plastic container.

Such a description may sound overwhelming, but the many parts bounce off each other and dance together with a wondrous coherence that is Moguillansky’s signature playful, irreverent, revelatory, and wide-eyed spirit. His films are knowing yet effervescent, never weighed down by cynicism, grounded in a deep understanding of the sorrows and difficulties of the times, invigorated by the profound joy and fascination that the director finds in all art forms, and lifted with an appreciation for the absurd. Pin de Fartie epitomizes the director’s methodology and declares his devotion to cinema, resulting in a work that assures us that film is alive and well even under the increasing chaos of today.

On the occasion of Pin de Fartie’s screening at AFI Fest 2025, we had the privilege of interviewing Alejo Moguillansky. We spoke about the impact of the pandemic on his viewpoint as a filmmaker, his approach to conceptual and visual motifs, and his dedication to finding truth and beauty through film and cinematic history.

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LF: Towards the end of La edad media (The Middle Ages), in a heartbreaking moment of revelation, your wife and creative partner, Luciana Acuña, states, “As if it didn’t make sense that we should be the ones who construct that new form of post-pandemic art, […] I reckon we have to quit.” How did that declaration of the need for change after the pandemic play out in the formation of Pin de Fartie? How did it motivate you to shift your focus away from the struggle of working as an artist, a recurring theme in your films that’s not explored in Pin de Fartie?

AM: I don’t know if there is an answer for that, but I remember that statement in The Middle Ages very well. It was a sensation that we all had during those days. The pandemic and this situation of us being all together and enclosed at home led to questions regarding future generations. Specifically, would this be the end of our generation? Who will need us after all of this? This is a clever question…Pin de Fartie has this long feeling of an ending, and yet something is trying to survive, and it is condemned not to die. That is the tricky thing about Pin de Fartie. There are two people saying goodbye and saying goodbye forever. So, now that I think about it, Pin de Fartie is totally related to that statement in The Middle Ages, but I wasn’t conscious of this before.

Of course, after the pandemic restrictions in Argentina, we had a Libertarian government made of very right wing vulgar people — people who were nearly trying to destroy culture and destroy cinema, but you, of course, are no luckier that we are with this situation in the United States, yes? So, this predicament of being a stranger in your own country is inherent in Pin de Fartie as well as that comment from Lu in The Middle Ages. After the pandemic when this synchronization occurred with all of us returning to our daily lives, our lives collided with the right wing government, which produced a precarious climate where the predominance of artists in our country began to feel like they were foreigners in their own land. And it wasn’t just this feeling of being outsiders in our country, it was more that we were beginning to struggle with the idea of “homeland” itself.

Actually, Pin de Fartie began filming in Switzerland, in a little town called La Tour-de-Peilz which is near Lausanne. I had a residency as a professor teaching film at the École cantonale d’art de Lausanne, and as it happened, I arrived at the school the same day our president in Argentina was elected. So this all felt very strange to me. Arriving at this place, near that lake, in this country. I mean, really, what is Switzerland? Is it even a country (laughs)? I was in this odd place, but I was also from a country that I didn’t even recognize anymore. This notion was in my skin. It was the first sensation that provoked the making of Pin de Fartie.

GF: In Pin de Fartie, there’s an absence of the telescope, which is a part of Beckett’s Endgame and is central to La edad media. We only hear about a telescope in the narration of the life of the mother played by Margarita Fernández. In thinking of La edad media and Pin de Fartie as two works in connected periods of transition, how did you think about the progression of what the telescope represents as a symbol and object?

AM: I don’t think of the telescope as a symbol, really. It is just an instrument like a camera that allows you to look at the world, to look at the stars and to look at people. Therefore, as an instrument, it is very interesting because you can see more with a camera and with a telescope than you normally can with the eye alone. You see more about stars, but you also see more about people, the relationships between them and with the background. I think the telescope is a way to discuss the filmmaking process, or the creation of the film, which is a theme we often revisit. The action of using a telescope somehow invokes the idea of the connection between the image and the people who make it because, in my films, the people who are in front of and behind the camera are regularly interchangeable. Given that cinema itself is present within the film, perhaps the telescope echoes the camera, pointing at the concept of seeing with an instrument that allows you to see more than you ever could with your normal sight.

LF: Speaking of sight and seeing, there’s a comical repetition of concerns around the literalness of representations of hot and cold in Helmut Lachenmann’s opera in La vendedora de fósforos (The Little Match Girl). Pin de Fartie plays with many variations on the concept of sight and seeing and the moon without ever being too literal or overly opaque — you find a perfect in between. How much of that balance is decided during writing versus editing?

AM: There is no writing process that involves the moon or the trains. None of that has to do with scripting. Not at all. They are like visual motifs that we have, and somehow, we work with these motifs in a similar way that musicians work with motifs and themes. The opening notes to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a theme in the same way that the moon in my film is a theme. Maybe we all just select and work with themes that are, for whatever reason, interesting to us. But at the same time, there is a reason behind those moons and those skies and trains — the image doesn’t have to capture the actual object to be true. Or to phrase it better, cinema can create a new truth. If someone or something belongs to beauty in cinema, then it’s true! If something belongs somehow to a cinematographic idea that allows us to trust in that moon, then it is true! It doesn’t matter that it is a little light toy that we used to create that moon. The same goes for the electric trains that you see on the table in Pin de Fartie — if we want to believe that it’s a train, then we can do it.

Perhaps the film is simply saying that. Up against this idea of hyperrealism that artificial intelligence gives to us, where AI overpollutes the best details of the image, then maybe it’s more honest and less fake to present these things that are obviously toys. A good example is the moon that you see in Georges Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon). When I think of a moon in cinema, I always think of the moon in Méliès’s film or the moon surrounded by clouds that Murnau presents to us in Faust. It is nice to think of this idea that cinema is always dealing with reality, and that reality doesn’t have to mean that something is real. Perhaps, reality just needs to be something that belongs to beauty, and in some way, if you can create a cinematographic motif, then that can be as true as a moon from Murnau. If it belongs to cinema, then it becomes true.

GF: Staying with this idea of cinema and the real, while Pin de Fartie feels like the most tonally somber film in your career thus far, it is also one that marvels in the possibility of cinema — exemplified by the gorgeously filmed scenes of Inés Duacastella and Ana Roy working on creating images and sounds using a variety of models and tools. In parallel to this, there’s also an undercurrent of Cleo’s arrival to adulthood: we first see Cleo in El loro y el cisne (The Parrot and The Swan), and she’s been a part of all of your subsequent films all the way up to your newest. In these previous films, Cleo acts in a semi-documentary context, but in Pin de Fartie, she acts in a more fictional cinematic one. In making your latest, how important was it for you to welcome Cleo to take part in the artistic wonders of cinema now that she is older?

AM: We’ll see how this develops in the future. When we were shooting in Switzerland, I had this thought about Beckett’s play and how it is about two people saying goodbye. What we were making is not an adaptation, but more of an anagram of Endgame with Santiago and Cleo in Switzerland. I recall this thought of saying goodbye as it was very touching for me because it was like saying goodbye to a daughter’s childhood before she goes off into adulthood. Of course, this question of whether or not she’ll be working with us in the future was a question that was very emotional because we have no idea if she ever will work with us again. Somewhere in our thought process was this belief that this might indeed be the last time that we’ll ever work together. That was how I personally felt as a father of a teenage daughter, and at the same time, there was this need to portray our era.

For example, as you both know my film The Middle Ages very well, you’ll remember that there is a scene where this character arrives in a cloud of smoke. Well, that character was played by Luis Biasotto, who was like Luciana’s brother as he was co-director of Lu’s dance-theatre troupe Grupo Krapp for twenty years. He was like part of our family in a very, very deep way, and sadly, he died from Covid only a few weeks after the shooting of the film. For us, his death was like a knife to the heart, and it was especially hard for Luciana.

After Luis’s death, that silly scene with the Jedi swords suddenly became sacred to us as we had shot the final performance of a great artist. In a way, that was like a miracle. In the end, you come to the conclusion that you are always shooting people who won’t be here forever, and thus, you have a moral responsibility as a filmmaker. You are portraying someone, and you must be aware that what’s filmed will be an archive of that person. You better do it well!

You have to put great thought into it and make a good shot. So, in those terms, each shot that you shoot in a film like this becomes very particular. Furthermore, Pin de Fartie is a film that is in love with the actors, what they are capable of by going from nothing to fiction. What then becomes worthwhile is this ability to portray a generation. That is the moment when things get more dangerous and important as you care about the shots even more. You’re always making fiction, but as a shortcut to portray your own generation. It feels more interesting that way because the most truthful image that you can make comes from fiction. In that sense, when portraying the actors or the DP Inés and her assistant or the gaffer in the film, it all becomes the same. You’re just making an archive of your group.

LF: That makes sense as it becomes an ode to all of the parts that go into filmmaking. It celebrates it, and I think that’s one of the reasons why so many of the scenes in Pin de Fartie are as exceptionally beautiful and moving as they are.

GF: Especially the ending, which touches me greatly because it suggests to me that although Cleo may not be physically involved with your films in the future, she is still a force that presides over them.

AM: In the end, our homeland is cinema, no? That is where we really belong. In the case of a cinephile like me, you will always find a countershot. So somehow the end of the film says that Cleo is going to be like the water against the rock. It suggests that you will always find an image. Our last place will be an image that belongs to cinema. It’s interesting to think of this in terms of our homeland. Case in point, what is Argentine cinema? What is American or French cinema now? Can we talk about French cinema? You can say that there are two or three directors from a particular country who interest you, but maybe we are past thinking about a country’s specific cinema.

LF: That makes sense. Our national identities have a part to play in our own fiction and realities, but we’re also extremely interconnected. We’re super global now. So what does it mean to say “homeland” when the devices we have in our lives bring us everywhere and anywhere in the world at any time, and meanwhile, there is also this homogenizing force of everything that is the internet.

AM: Yes. Here in Argentina, everyone always talks about national cinema. It is a term, “national cinema,” and you can’t imagine this idea of a Swiss person talking about national cinema. It is interesting how this works. In the United States, do people talk about this idea of national cinema?

LF: In America, we don’t talk about national cinema, but we do discuss this brand of America, how America has its own brand of entertainment more than anything that captures a distinctive sense or feeling of our present and how we are connected to our history.

GF: Oddly, I feel that the ideal for our national cinematic identity should be more about the idiosyncratic aspects of each region: the south, the west coast, New England. This thought partially comes from a talk we had with John Sayles and Maggie Renzi a decade ago about their hope that American independent directors from the 80s and 90s would have continued to make distinctively regional films that represented the specific communities and places of America that each director came from, which could have altogether defined an inherently mosaic-like filmmaking identity of the States. They were disappointed that over time most of these independent directors moved away from that ideal and into more generalist films that didn’t define any region.

LF: What we so greatly admire in your filmography since Castro is your ability to create a grounded notion of play. By this, we think of your use of dance, music, literature, slapstick comedy, and cinema as forms with structures and principles that you work within and depart from to create a sense of freedom and imagination while still also being completely conscious of the limitations of reality — be it fiscal or economic such as the challenges of producing art and surviving or psychological such as the obligation to family and artistic collaborators. How much does your sense of play naturally emerge from improvisation?

AM: Yes, sometimes it is improvisational, but that’s not the case in all of my work. Sometimes my films are born out of documentary material, for example like Lachenmann’s rehearsals in Teatro Colón in La vendedora de fósforos or Grupo Krapp’s rehearsals in El loro y el cisne. Little by little, we surrounded the documentary with fiction with countershots and were led by the idea that one image might provoke a countershot. That’s how we work. We imagine how that one shot could give us something else which then brings us to another countershot. That is the real strategy of writing for us. For example, with El loro y el cisne, first there is this idea of someone dancing; then, there is this idea of having the dancer with the soundman with a boom mic, which then creates the film crew. Okay, now that we have created the film crew, we must create other dance companies who are being framed by this film crew! This is how we work.

Of course, we delve a lot into improvisation, yes, but I wouldn’t say that my films emanate from improvisation, but instead they come from work. In the beginning of filming, there are always images that become interesting to us, and those images create countershots, and those countershots become the script in the end. I would say that this is our logical path. The improvisation comes into play more with the actors like in theater situations. We encourage that kind of improvisation. We have a lot of fun with that because those efforts become more of the silly jokes of the film.

GF: I understand, but to be more specific, in the case of El loro y el cisne, what was the step-by-step progression of turning El Pampero Cine’s sound engineer Rodrigo Sánchez Mariño into the central character of the film?

AM: I like him, of course! I like his body, and I like the way he is in the world. I like his kind of quiet character, but eventually, the path was exactly as I described before. During that time, I felt that it took a huge effort to hide the boom mic from the shots. So I started to include more shots of the boom microphone, and then more shots of Rodrigo’s arm, and then his whole body because I thought, “Why are we hiding this man who is such a good character? Why?” It’s all part of this idea that film can conquer everything in the end. The film can conquer its own countershot, even its own backstage.

This is also connected to the idea that film has always been able to conquer other languages. Film was able to conquer theater; it was able to conquer opera; it was able to conquer ballet. Film is a language that is so flexible like water that it is able to become another thing like music or opera. Everything except for television because it was television that became the conqueror of cinema (laughs). We see this very clearly now. The language of the films on platforms like Netflix have more to do with television language than with filmmaking.

Thus, when thinking about that and trying to create a resistance, it might be logical for cinema to continue to shoot in other languages, in other arts. I think of this example from André Bazin and his book on Jean Renoir where he discusses Renoir’s thoughts on shooting theater and framing the whole stage. By giving a distance and not going onto the stage, this creates a distance between you and the theatrical representation, and this distance talks about theater, but it also talks about cinema as well because you are seeing the dialog between two languages. I think that’s what we do with literature in how we film my hand underlining the lines in pages of Endgame, and we take a similar approach in shooting music with the way we present Maxi Prietto playing guitar and singing in Pin de Fartie as this sort of Greek chorus that he provides with Luciana for the film in the recording studio.

It is obvious that when you shoot other artistic languages that you are at the same time shooting your own language. Therefore, when we go to another language such as dance or literature or music, we are always trying to talk about cinema.

Every image is the encounter of two points of view, and a true image is achieved when you have this dialog inside of the image. So this incorporation of other languages is the way for cinema to resist against becoming the common television language that makes the predominance of what we see look uniform today.

Pin de Fartie screens at AFI Fest on Thursday, October 23 and Saturday, October 25 with Alejo Moguillansky in attendance.

Featured photo courtesy of El Pampero Cine. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

AFI Fest 2025 • El Pampero Cine