Argentina’s Oscar-winning movie industry is battling for survival as President Javier Milei applies his “chainsaw” approach to budget cuts to the country's cultural sector. At the Cannes Film Festival, where several movies from Argentina are on show, the country’s film workers are determined to get their message across, both on and off the screen.
Cinema’s glitzy Riviera gathering is often described as a celebrity bubble, but politics and activism are never far away.
This year’s edition has already made festival history with a series of protests against sex abuse in cinema, on the heels of a belated #MeToo reckoning that has swept France’s film industry. The wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East have also been frequent topics of discussion, though festival organisers have been at pains to avoid any red-carpet protests.
Read more‘Wind of revolt’ sweeps French cinema in belated #MeToo reckoning
On Monday night, the spotlight fell on the upcoming US presidential election with the red-carpet premiere of Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice”, which traces Donald Trump’s rise as an ambitious young property developer in 1970s and '80s New York under the sinister mentorship of cutthroat attorney Roy Cohn.
A spokesman for Trump described the film as “garbage” and “election interference by Hollywood elites”, threatening legal action, though some film critics in Cannes found it surprisingly lenient with the tycoon former president.
Cinema’s “liberal elites” are a frequent target of Argentina’s Trump-admiring leader Javier Milei, whose crippling budget cuts were the focus of another protest earlier in the festival, part of the Argentinian film industry’s efforts to raise awareness of its plight under the self-declared “anarcho-capitalist” president.
On Sunday, about a hundred Argentinian film workers rallied in Cannes to denounce Milei’s policies of defunding film industry and the wider cultural sector.
“The current government has embarked on a crusade against culture, science and education,” said Argentinian film producer Clara Massot. “And it seems to be relishing this demolition of the cultural sector.”
She accused the government of stripping Argentina “of its very identity by attacking an industry that is a vital source of jobs for tens of thousands of Argentinian households”.
Film industry on hold
A champion of the radical right, Milei has set in motion the “fiscal shock” promised in his inaugural speech to drag Argentina out of the economic crisis it has been experiencing in recent years. His “chainsaw” approach to budget cuts has plunged the country into austerity, gutting social benefit schemes, squeezing state education budgets and slashing cultural subsidies.
On March 11, Milei’s government announced drastic spending cuts for the film industry, including an end to state support for festivals. The world-famous Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Argentina’s biggest annual film gathering, must now rely on private funding to survive.
Milei’s plans to defund Argentina’s National Institute of Film and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA) also jeopardises Argentina’s leading film school, ENERC, where it is unclear whether classes will resume at the start of the next academic year. Also at risk is the Ventana Sur film and television market, a partner of the Cannes Film Market, which is reportedly considering a move to neighbouring Uruguay.
“Everything is suspended right now and we don’t know what will happen next,” said producer Nicolas Avruj, who helped organise the Cannes protest. “We’ve become a punching ball [for the government],” he added.
“The aim is not to kill us off right away but to bleed us dry.”
Milei himself has said the country must choose between “funding movies that nobody watches” and “feeding people”. Film workers counter that defunding their industry will only increase unemployment, pushing more families into poverty.
While Massot acknowledged the depth of Argentina’s current economic crisis, she described the government’s squeeze on the film industry as a “false remedy”. She noted that France’s national film institute, the CNC, was set up in the wake of World War II, when the country was broke.
“This supposed antagonism between culture and the economy, where we have to choose one or the other – it’s a lie,” she said.
‘Filmmaking will become a rich man’s sport’
The crisis roiling Argentina’s film industry has resulted in a diminished presence at Cannes this year. There is no Argentinian Pavilion on the palm tree-lined Croisette, the town’s iconic seaside boulevard, and no INCAA stand at the festival’s sprawling Film Market.
But the likes of Massot and Avruj are determined to get their message across at the world’s largest movie gathering, rallying under the banner “Cine Argentino Unido” ("Argentine Cinema United").
Cannes is showcasing seven movies from Argentina this year, all of them screened in the festival’s parallel segments separate from the flagship Palme d’Or race. Some of the films shed light on the social and economic crisis that has precipitated the rise of Milei’s far right.
In the Directors’ Fortnight, Hernan Rosselli’s comedy, “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed” explored Argentina’s shadow economy, following a family of bookmakers in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. In the Critics’ Week sidebar, director Frédéric Luis focused on the discrimination suffered by people with disabilities in his “Simon de la montaña” ("Simon of the Mountain"). Meanwhile, Augustina Sanchez’s short film “Nuestra sombra” ("Our Own Shadow") tackled the human cost of deforestation in the country’s rural northeast.
Over in the ACID (independent film association) section dedicated to emerging talent, 36-year-old Iair Said won plaudits for his feature-length fiction debut “Most People Die on Sundays”, about a gay, middle-class Jew from Buenos Aires who returns from studying abroad to attend his uncle’s funeral. Played by the director himself, the endearingly clumsy protagonist struggles to find his place as he grapples with an ageing mother and a comatose father kept alive by an artificial respirator.
Inspired by Said’s own experience, “Most People Die on Sundays” exposes the prohibitive cost of funerals in the crisis-stricken Latin American country.
“When my father died, we had to pay $10,000 to bury him in a Jewish cemetery. It took us two and a half years to pay that amount,” said the filmmaker, who also voiced his concern about the future of Argentina’s film industry.
“Because of these reforms, far fewer people will have the opportunity to make films. Without public funding, it will become a rich man’s sport,” he said, adding that reliance on public funding would put the industry on a “dangerous path” to curtailing artistic freedom.
“I am not optimistic about the future of Argentinian cinema,” he said. “But we have to resist and find ways to continue telling our stories, hoping that this is only a bad patch we are going through.”
