Un hombre se tira al agua, A Man jumps into the Water

The initial impulse behind the film, its seed, what truly set it in motion, was indeed the news story itself. I’m one of those people - perhaps among the last - who still watch television, and that’s where I first came across it.

The first thing that struck me was the headline: “A man dives into the Palermo lakes and never resurfaces.” It sounded like the title of a Bresson film, something along the lines of A Man Escaped, but paradoxically without any escape. There was something at once tragic and beautiful about the event. What drives someone to dive into the water and never come back up? If it was suicide, it was a rather extraordinary one; if it was accidental, it remained shrouded in mystery.

I have always been drawn to what Foucault called the “stupid violence of things” when speaking about Roland Barthes’ death. In other words, the way death becomes intertwined with absurdity, and absurdity with mystery and poetry. That headline alone was enough to make me imagine a possible film. But I kept following the story, and other layers of meaning gradually emerged, which, I believe, ultimately enriched the film.

It was during the editing process that I began to realize that what had initially been conceived as a single voice actually needed to be inhabited by many voices. In other words, I discovered that the film truly resided in variation. It was only then that I replaced much of the voice-over—which essentially repeated what had been said on the television news—with other voices (journalistic, literary, cinematic), other textures (the artificiality of a “studio voice” combined with documentary realism), and other registers (a kind of sonic found footage).

This polyphony eventually became narrative as well, a way of constructing different perspectives on the event. Although I already knew what had “really” happened, I didn’t want that knowledge to eclipse what cinema itself could do with this material. In the end, what remained was a film about the difficulty of articulating a way of looking at reality, especially today.

The filmmaker always arrives too late. Cinema rarely reaches events as they unfold. That leaves the filmmaker suspended in a kind of void, trying to decipher the traces left behind in space. I imagined camera movements that would attempt to reconstruct the paths the character might have taken—a kind of true-crime reenactment, but without actors, using only space and time.

As for repetition, I didn’t think of it merely as a way of emphasizing something, but rather as another form of variation. I’ve always been interested in repetition because, on the one hand, it allows us to play with what is inherently fragile or imperfect about cinema—with the unfinished attempt, the incomplete take, the sketch. But it also opens up the poetic possibilities of repetition, whether as rhythmic punctuation or as a syncopated melody.

Initially, I had planned to make a different short film using a 16 mm Bolex because I needed to shoot frame by frame. It was a rather programmatic film that would only require one intense day of shooting. While preparing that project, I came across the news story about the man who had jumped into the water. I wondered whether I could take advantage of the fact that I was already shooting on 16 mm to make a second film in the same format.

At the same time, changing its material nature inevitably transformed the way I thought about the project. That was when I became interested in shooting with an old roll of expired Ilford black-and-white film that a friend had given me, which had been out of date for more than twenty years. Incorporating error, deterioration, and the material’s own “lifespan” allowed me to deepen the connection the film seeks to establish with death.

In the end, I found myself with two short films that, fundamentally, are about the same thing. That is why I think of them as a kind of diptych—a conversation around a shared theme.

At first, the short film was narrated in the first person, with my own voice-over providing many more personal details than those that ultimately remained in the finished version. In response to this, a friend reminded me of something another friend, Rafael Filippelli, once told us, a phrase that stayed with both of us: “The first person has to be earned.”

I thought a great deal about that idea and realized that I needed a double distance. I eventually rewrote the narration in the third person and invited actor Agustín Gagliardi, with whom I had already worked and whom I was directing at the same time in my next feature film, to perform the voice-over. That did not mean distancing myself from the “I”; rather, it meant finding it again from another place. Apparently someone did find it, since your question assumes the existence of a more personal register even though the film never uses the first person—and it isn’t even my own voice! (laughs)

I don’t know whether it’s “fair” or not, but it is certainly something that came to mind as I reflected on the film, for several reasons.

The first is that I came across this news story on a very particular day: the anniversary of President Javier Milei’s first year in office. Almost like a parallel montage created by channel surfing, the story of this man who had thrown himself into the water coexisted with the president’s aggressive speech promoting what Milei called “shock therapy.” I couldn’t help but think of these two events as somehow connected, as though one were the consequence of the other. That is why I decided to begin the film by mentioning “December 10, 2024,” anchoring it in a precise historical moment while trying not to make it entirely dependent upon—or imprisoned by—that context. In other words, I wanted to avoid reproducing the forms of journalism or television news while still incorporating them from a certain distance.

At the same time—and I think many people are already aware of this—the social, cultural, and political situation in Argentina was beginning to look truly bleak. Today, it has only grown worse.

The management of the INCAA had already been far from ideal, especially for more modest forms of filmmaking. But Carlos Pirovano’s intervention under the Milei administration has been even more damaging: it has dismantled and degraded what little was still functioning, while fostering an utterly disproportionate hostility toward Argentine cinema. A systematic project targeting Argentine cinema was beginning to emerge—or at least targeting a certain kind of Argentine cinema, the kind my friends and I belong to.

Many colleagues suddenly found themselves without work. In my own case, a feature film that had previously been declared “of cultural interest” by the INCAA was ultimately rejected by the new administration. For me, that meant giving up on making it, because I felt that the film simply could not exist without the support of the National Film Institute.

Faced with that situation, I decided to transform this short film into a film about remnants, made from remnants—a film about what remains along the way: incompletion, failure, and wounds. A film composed of fragments of stories, newspaper articles, clippings, and deteriorated textures. That is why I chose to include this third “news story” in the short film: it seemed to me to be, in its own way, yet another way of speaking about death.

The good news is that the project has now come back to life, and I’m about to finish shooting it. As I mentioned, Agustín Gagliardi has a role in it, and the film is titled Viviendo con los muertos (Living with the Dead). And yes—it’s a zombie film. Argentina keeps getting worse and worse.