Lost in La Pampa
Voted Best Film of 2023 by Cahiers du Cinéma, Laura Citarella’s Argentine epic Trenque Lauquen has made history as the first Argentine film to top the magazine’s list in its 70-year history.
Trenque Lauquen (Argentina, Germany, 2022) is a multi-genre epic encompassing romance, detective story and science fiction. Set in a small town in the heart of La Pampa and produced by radical film collective El Pampero Cine, the film unfolds over 12 chapters, spanning two parts (a total of 262 minutes) drawing the viewer into a world that is both mysterious and enthralling. A woman vanishes, sparking a series of journeys and mysteries. Two men take to the road in search of her: they both love her. Why did she leave?
Ahead of the release we spoke to director Laura Citarella about shooting Trenque Lauquen in the Argentine heartlands.
“We are deeply focused on crafting films that offer not only a cinematic experience but also a journey and an adventure.”Laura Citarella, Senses of Cinema
AFF: I wanted to start by asking what made you decide set the film in the town of Trenque Lauquen (in Buenos Aires Province). Did you grow up there?
LC: I spent a lot of time there growing up. My family – my Mum, Dad, grandparents – they are all from there and it was the place where we went to spend the summer holidays and Christmases, and the place where I forged a relationship with La Pampa. So a lot of the elements in the film, for example the radio station, were spaces where I spent a lot of time and knew very well. That bar, Kalos, where people go to have breakfast on a Saturday morning, the library, they’re places that are very familiar to me. But the film is a fiction around the portrait of the place.
AFF: One of the things that really stood out for me was the landscape and the fact that the women were able to walk so freely in that countryside, it felt almost idyllic.
LC: Argentine literature and film have often used the image of the figure walking in the countryside but it is always a man. When it is a woman it becomes strange: dangerous and unrealistic. But I liked the idea of exploring that image within the realm of the fiction. A woman lost in La Pampa. What happens? What does it evoke? A lot of the time it provokes uncertainty: you wonder if she’s in danger, if she might fall prey to the criminal world. I thought it was interesting to disassociate that image with all of those things.
AFF: But at the same time there is that connection between women and nature.
LC: Again, there’s a certain mystery behind that connection that’s hard to explain. There’s nothing more enabling than a rural setting to facilitate a character’s liberation. The landscape allows them to disentangle themselves from everything. So I couldn’t imagine a different setting. At the same time in literature and film the woman is often a mysterious subject that has to be captured and understood, and I was trying to do something in contrast to that.
AFF: Another thing that struck me was the passing of time in the film. The pace of life and the rhythm of Trenque Lauquen seem very different to that which you’d find in a big city.
Yes that’s absolutely true. Shooting there allowed the film to exist in a different way. At the same time – and this is something that I’ve explored in my films, particularly in Ostende – it’s as if the slower passage of time is not very productive. Giving time to fiction, to discovery, to pleasure, to friendship, all of those things come from a place of leisure that’s unproductive. So I made sure the characters also had jobs in this film!
AFF: But I loved that these characters choose to spend their free time looking through books, reading old letters and trying to solve mysteries from the past. Even though we know we’re in the present the effect is as if they are frozen in time.
LC: The film has a very intense relationship with the analogue world: the radio, the newspaper. When we started filming the radio and the newspaper were still working normally. The pandemic speeded up the process of changing the mediums of communication in a small town. Now you would imagine yourself getting information from social media.
The pandemic accelerated everything globally – it was already in the works – but now what’s happened is that in a very short space of time there is a visual change in the things we see and deal with in our day–to-day realities. The building where the radio was, that’s now gone, the newspapers aren’t being printed the way they were before the pandemic.
So I think it’s beautiful to register those spaces and those ways of living. Cinema allows the possibility of capturing those things in order to remember them.
That’s all for now,
The Argentine Film Festival team