Alejo Moguillansky
Director, editor, and co-founder of the El Pampero Cine collective
by Lily and Generoso Fierro
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.
