PORTRAITS OF THE FUTURE

Before the pandemic, the filmmaker Virna Molina was shooting a film about the resistance of the subway delegates in Buenos Aires, but the lockdown interrupted it and several protagonists died from COVID 19. The stopped project is now a philosophical essay on the new "normality" that affects us.

VIRNA MOLINA

Virna Molina was born in Buenos Aires in 1975. Her films, co-directed with Ernesto Ardito, obtained 62 international awards. Virna and Ernesto's first film was the documentary feature Raymundo (2003), about Raymundo Gleyzer, a filmmaker who disappeared due to the military dictatorship. Between 2008 and 2017 she made the feature films: Heart of the Factory (2008), Moreno (2013), Alejandra (2013), The Future is ours (2014), and the TV Series for Encuentro Channel, about the main argentine writers: Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Maria Elena Walsh, Alejandra Pizarnik. He won twice the grants Jan Vrijman Fund (IDFA, Netherlands) and Altercine (Montreal). In 2017 she premiered the fiction film Symphony for Ana. The movie was on the bill for six months and won the Russian Film Critics Award at the Moscow Int. Film Festival. In 2021 Virna finished Portraits of the Future, her first documentary directed alone, after 20 years of co-direction with Ernesto Ardito.  She has recently finished Hitler's Witch, her second fiction film, which was shot in the midst of a pandemic. It will be released in the coming months.

I lived my early childhood during the darkest and most violent stage of the military dictatorship in Argentina, and that marked me forever. I was educated under the logic of terror.

I always did films about past. This is my first film about Future. But ¿What is Future?

I believe that we decide how to draw and paint the Future. At time that I did the film, in the midst of the isolation due covid-19 pandemic, I could only see the Future as an old picture in black and white. Because I was alone,  trying to get answers to the problems that we were living but I understood that the exit to social problems is always collective and material, not virtual.

The film has very personal or historical or political or social moments, but always they dialogue with each other. When this dialogue does not exist, I feel the film does not advance,  does not work.

 

The film explores in between documentary and fiction. Someone asked to me:  ¿does one exist with the absence of the other? And I answered him: nothing in the world exist alone, Fiction and Reality are not the exception. But at the same time, documentary or fiction are categories that we build to understand our existence. The world is changing very fast and categories are getting old. In my film I began to find new images that don't belong to fiction or documentary, and it was the first time in my life, as a filmmaker, that I experience something like this.

• IDFA Amsterdam, Netherlands
• It's all true - International Documentary Film Festival of Brazil
• Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival, Greece
• Durban International Film Festival, Documentary Competition, South Africa

Doker 2022 — Let IT dok!