“We know how to put our fingers in the socket”

‘Homo Argentum’ arrives in Spanish cinemas after achieving two million viewers in Argentina, including Javier Mileiwho praised the film. “There were opinions of all types and colors,” Its directors, Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, respond in this regard, acknowledging that they know how to “put their fingers in the plug.”

The movie that premieres in Spain this Thursday, December 25 is a collection of sixteen satirical portraits, all starring the actor Guillermo Francella in different roles, with an argument that for the Argentine president “reveals many of the aspects of the dark and hypocritical agenda of the progressive caviar (woke).”

“He was just another spectator. It is not something new in our films, in ‘The Man Next Door’ (2010) the Government of that time (chaired by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) also gave its opinion,” says Duprat in an interview with Cohn, his creative partner since the 90s in films such as ‘Official Competition’ and ‘The Illustrious Citizen’.

Nevertheless, admit that none of their previous projects had “the astronomical dimension of ‘Homo Argentum’, weeks and weeks on television, all channels at the same time, the newspapers, people giving their opinions on the street”, as if it were “a debate about the country” and its “political affiliation” when it is only “an artistic work”, say the directors about its Argentine premiere last August.

For Cohn, in addition, “in some way it also demonstrated the inversely proportional distance between critics and the public that goes and pays a ticket to see a film,” since the reception in some specialized media was far from the enthusiasm of the box office data.

He films was born from an idea of ​​Francella himself, who, in the middle of filming the series ‘The Manager’ (also created by Cohn and Duprat in 2022), suggested the directors watch ‘The Monsters’ (1963), an Italian neorealist comedy directed by Dino Risi that they loved.

“We wrote forty stories, we chose sixteen and gave them to the actor to read, who said: “I loved them, which one should I star in?” and I said: “no, no, all of them”, because they are men of that age”, reports Duprat.

Among others, the actor from ‘The Secret in Their Eyes’ and the recent ‘Playa de lobos’, along with Dani Rovira, takes on the role of a hypocritical film director who “of course offended our colleagues,” they emphasize, but who “is strictly taken from reality.”

“For many years, poverty or indigenism was filmed to be shown at luxury European festivals. And history also shows directors or actors who take advantage of any award they win to go on stage and give their homily in favor of noble causes, without understanding anything of what they are saying,” they say.

The movie too deals with the issue of emigration, both the one that came to Argentina from Spain and Italy and, above all, the one that is currently taking the opposite path, which for the directors is not being treated equitably.

“It is objectiveor, 3.5 million Spaniards and 4 million Italians arrived in Argentina. I don’t know if the young Spaniards know that they were received in a very luxurious hotel, the Immigrant Hotel, which was in the port of Buenos Aires, where an official asked them what they knew how to do and looked for a job for them,” says Cohn.

In any case, in one of the most incisive stories in this regard, the directors prefer to focus on Italy, because “we prefer that they continue to love us here, since we come more often,” they ironically, although the real story on which it is based happened to a friend of theirs in Spain who had to “run away.”