By Talia Ryckman-Klein
W SPOTLIGHT: I just wanted to say congratulations on the film! I loved getting to watch it, and (congratulations) on having its North American premiere! How does that feel to be in Montreal?
Leon Schwitter: It’s super nice. For me, it’s my first time in Canada, for her as well, and it’s always very absurd. We are always saying that this little village and these stories together travel, and can be shown in a place where we’ve never been, and we're enjoying it a lot. We’re quite sad that tomorrow is our last day because Montreal is super cool. The festival (Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montreal) was amazing, and the programming was amazing. Yeah, it was a blast!
W SPOTLIGHT: Oh, I’m so glad to hear it!
AGOSTINA DI LUCIANO: Yeah, and I think what I always find very crazy from where I live is with the power of cinema is like, that you can show a very small place, I don’t know, in the middle of Argentina, in Montreal, or in China, or I don’t know where, and I find that kind of crazy. I was like, really entering yesterday into the cinema and thinking, like, wow, all those people are being shown a completely other part of the world.
LEON SCHWITTER: Yeah.
DI LUCIANO: Yeah, such an absurd experience.
W SPOTLIGHT: I can imagine, and something that must be so dear and so important to you. And I think that that’s one of the things that’s so special about art is it just, there are such universal themes at its core and people will be drawn to it and compelled to watch it, and I certainly was with this film.
SCHWITTER: Thank you so much! That’s good to hear.
DI LUCIANO: Thank you!
W SPOTLIGHT: Of course! Now, I think one of my first questions would be, what drew both of you to wanting to make this film, and to telling these stories?
SCHWITTER: The town where the film is set was founded by the grand, grand, grand father of Agostina in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, and so Agostina always had the connection with this place, with this village. She was always telling me about that it’s a village which feels like time stood still. And so it was always a thing that I wanted to go there, and we wanted-
DI LUCIANO: It’s interesting, I don’t know if you’ve been in Argentina, but we come from Buenos Aires, and it’s like this very big city, and I’m always going to those places, and the perception of time and what you observe is completely different. So, it was always like this moment of like, you’re in the city, you come back, and in those three summer holiday months, you’re spending a completely other reality of like, what you’re used to. And I think you are always amazed by it. Like, coming from a completely other place and Argentina being such a big country, somehow.
SCHWITTER: Mhm. Yeah, and then the project kind of originated a bit that we meant to make the story a bit longer, we were at the festival in Mexico, and we met an old German experimental filmmaker, Heinz Emigholz, and he told us that he makes three films every year, otherwise he just feels sad.
W SPOTLIGHT: Oh wow!
SCHWITTER: And we were like, how do you do that? Because I just came from spending four years to make my first feature, and it just takes us a lot of time to distribute. You need to travel all the time. How do you make three films?
W SPOTLIGHT: Absolutely!
DI LUCIANO: Yeah, it's crazy!
W SPOTLIGHT: I can’t even imagine.
DI LUCIANO: And he’s like 77, so imagine.
SCHWITTER: Yeah, 77.
W SPOTLIGHT: That’s incredible.
SCHWITTER: This legend who was working with Jonas Mekas, you know, like, coming from this kind of like experimental, 70s experimental cinema. And I mean, his thing is like he doesn’t have much money for his film. He doesn’t really care. He takes a camera, if he gets a grant for like 10k, he makes a film. And so we were like, oh yeah, maybe next time, we were planning to go for a couple of months to Argentina. Because Agostina is actually studying at the moment, and she’s doing a bachelors in Switzerland, so she lives also in Zurich. We thought, like, let’s just make a film next time we go to Argentina. Let’s go to this village that you, (Agostina), always talked to me about.
DI LUCIANO: And for something that way, for us was very important, a little bit what he told us, that sometimes with the limitation, you can play a lot around. Right? Because like, if you don’t have so much money, if you don’t have so much time, if you don’t have, like, those are all factors you can play with. And it was like, a completely other approach, of what a little bit what Leon said. Like of saying, okay! Let’s write the script, let’s do this and like, let’s kind of transform a little bit this process. Like okay. We have two, or one month and a half. We have just five thousand euros, and we have like this, and it’s like okay, let's try to do something. And I think like, sometimes those limitations, of course, like you can criticise a lot, like okay, what will happen if that develops and continues and where, for sure, it’s a completely other film. But I think like, for us, it was this experimenting of like, okay, we want to try something, we want to learn something, so let’s just do it!
SCHWITTER: And then, I think, yeah, because a lot of people, are always I think, a lot of filmmakers they’re always like, no…there are so many limits. They have so many arguments to not make a film.
W SPOTLIGHT: Right.
DI LUCIANO: The timings not right, the money is not right. And for us, it was kind of, so freeing to just say, let's just make it. And then we got 5k from a little grant. And with that, it was like okay, no excuses now. We rent the camera, and we shoot this. We didn’t even know what.
(All laugh)
SCHWITTER: And then uh, it was like a bit, the process was very much to search protagonists. And she, (Agostina), was always telling me about this Escalante family. Who you kind of spend your whole childhood with. Dana, who was the mother of Noah, in the film. You are friends since your early teenage years. Since you were 8, 9, 10. And so, there was already a trust and you always said, hey, that’s an interesting family because they’re so peculiar. They have lives that are so much based in nature. So much based in, really in this family, also community. We always found that very interesting. And then the other thing that always stuck out for us, or we would pick it out, because it was also our first co-direction. Agostina had never made a film, I was never in this region. So, we needed to find common ground and our common interests. We wanted to make Twin Peaks in Argentina. That was like the first thing because, looking at this region and there are so many interesting stories like, there’s a mountain that they say there are UFOs inside, and there’s an underground city…
W SPOTLIGHT: Oh wow!
SCHWITTER: It’s like, one story after another.
W SPOTLIGHT: That’s amazing. You know what, that was something I felt while watching the film, was I got David Lynch vibes while watching it. Which was really great.
SCHWITTER: Sweet! Okay, sweet.
DI LUCIANO: That’s a very nice thing to say.
W SPOTLIGHT: Yeah, I very much felt that throughout. The kind of like mysterious, kind of foreboding but in a very good way. I don’t know, it was just very immersive in that sense.
SCHWITTER: It’s not the nightmare, it’s probably more the cute film that we made. But it was very much like an inspiration in terms of just approaching this..because in the end, for us, this film is about stories, community, oral history, but also kind of how fantasy and fiction give us hope. Which we need to kind of keep going, to kind of change the world for the better. At least, imagine, possible, different narratives for our current world. So we were very much, our base was always like, okay we are very interested in folklore, in myths, in stories from there, and we started investigating and came across all these huge stories. And we thought, yeah, we cannot make a film about the underground city with UFOs. So, probably, we need to make this other film. But it was, we started to find another story about this chapel where, they say that the virgin disappeared, but they don’t know how. It’s kind of the shadow, it’s kind of imprinted on this wall. It was kind of like we started to collect all these stories and also figure out, okay, the Escalantes are one for sure. One of the protagonists of our film, so we started spending a lot of time with them. And also collecting their stories, which were like, for example, the story, because in this region there are a lot of forest fires, so all of these things. Spending a lot of time with them and observe their daily life, and slowly starting to film and introduce them to the camera.
DI LUCIANO: Yeah, but I think that's what, like, what I think, in the process, we didn’t know what to do. I think we had a direction. As you said, kind of like, okay, those inspirations from David Lynch. We knew a little bit an aesthetic. We knew as well, like, okay, we want to go with oral history. So, it's not that you search in a huge sea. It’s like you start searching a little with a direction, and I think like, that’s kind of important. At least, what I realised, like in something, if you don’t really know what to do, if not because the options are so big.
SCHWITTER: They’re so broad, yeah.
W SPOTLIGHT: It’s just so broad, like yeah, where do you even start. Yeah.
DI LUCIANO: Yeah, so I think in that way, it was really always a direction there. We wanted to play a little bit with myth, a little bit with showing the reality, and then what did happen in between, it’s open, and we can figure it out. But yeah, that I think, was very important. And sorry, we didn’t comment on it earlier, but it’s always interesting to mention that because we didn’t have a script we needed to edit while shooting.
W SPOTLIGHT: Oh, wow!
DI LUCIANO: Yeah, it was a lot.
W SPOTLIGHT: That’s a lot.
DI LUCIANO: I mean, just to know like, what is going on because like, if not, it’s very difficult. Not knowing really. Having material and not really knowing where you’re going, and just like, having to come to the room, and you are like, oh…something big was missing. So even though it was a lot, I think it was really needed for this kind of process.
SCHWITTER: Yeah, I think because in the end, the process was also, we knew from the start that we wanted to make something that combines fiction and documentary. So we knew also that we were not so interested in having, like, talking head interviews. It was not what we’re super interested in. So for us, it needs to be very playful. It needs to kind of feel a bit like a fiction feature but also like a doc, and in that, it was also like, okay, we need to find some sort of structure too. And then after like, shooting for three weeks, we had a break and were like, okay, we need to really look at the material we have and figure out if there is something there, and what do we pursue, and what is missing. That helped us a lot. We also discovered that the process, I think, in the second week of shooting, we discovered Rosana and Lily, who are the two women who are cleaning this semi-abandoned villa. And the film is also written out of fiction because the story of you (Agostina), because the house belonged to your grandmother, to your great grandmother, and it’s a lot of time empty. And we’re always finding this absurdity needs to be there. Her voice (Agostina) is the voice of the house owner. So we were searching for things to also question a bit, that is, class reality. That is also part of Argentine society, and also this political situation, these crises. Things like, which might seem absurd in other countries, but in Argentina, it’s very normal to search for signs of hope in, maybe, flipping a cup, or seeing an oracle, or lighting candles.
DI LUCIANO: Yeah, or whatever, having, I don’t know, like, kind of a little bracelet that protects you from bad things. So I think, you know, I always find that very interesting when people discuss if it’s a fiction or if it’s a documentary because, I mean, I don’t know what it is. It is what it is. What is true it’s like a lot of our elements that are real, like the moment with the pan going through the whole house. I mean, my grandma used to do that. So it’s like, even though it looks super absurd, it’s like, she really did it and going with the pan through the house.
W SPOTLIGHT: It’s real.
DI LUCIANO: Yeah. So I find that always very interesting, like how in the “real world”, always appears elements of absurdity, that if you play with them like, they can really make you enter into a playful fiction a bit. Yeah.
W SPOTLIGHT: Well, that was one of the things I loved so much about the film was the combination of that documentary style filmmaking and combining folklore and the elements of magic realism. It was kind of a perfect balance of both. Where, like, as you said, when you watch a documentary, you’re ready for the talking heads shots. Which is great! But I think, just the combined styles of this served to what the film was speaking to. Which is as you said, about storytelling and folklore and that kind of oral culture living on. So yeah, I think that was just… it’s quite rare to see that balance, but I loved it, and it’s really interesting to hear the background behind that. Because another question I had is, you did kind of speak about how you have a history with Dana (Escalante), and that’s how she came into the film, and then Omar, and Noah, of course, along with them. So I was wondering how Rosana and Lily came in. How you met them and got them to come along for the project?
SCHWITTER: So the story with Rosana and Lily was, they are cleaning the house that we were staying in. And we were meeting them there like observing, and we were like, okay. Because it’s like a) we have the absolute reality that happens a lot in Argentina, people have a lot of house cleaners, that’s a like a very common thing. But you never see them in cinema. It’s this thing that is also like, kind of an economy that’s very important for a lot of people. A lot of people depend on these jobs like they’re super low-paying jobs, and you need to work a shit ton of hours for different houses. But they have a family, and they told us they have like seven days a week sometimes for the low pay, and we were like, okay, you know what, you don’t need to clean our house, but we want to make a film with you! About what you do. We realised also with them, they’re so funny.
DI LUCIANO: Yeah.
SCHWITTER: They’re like the warmest two, the kindest two ladies. And we were like, it needs to be them. They need to be in our film.
DI LUCIANO: And as well, like, what I find interesting that sometimes, there are a lot of stereotypes when you’re representing the people, for example, cleaning, etc., it’s always a bit like they’re a little bit in the margin. It’s always a little bit like victimising them, and for us it’s very interesting to break a little bit this stereotype of like, hey, actually, they’re these super cool people! They’re super funny! They’re superpower women. Why not portray them like that? As well like, sometimes, what I find very interesting learning from Switzerland, like okay, a job is a job. And it’s like, you are not less because you do this job. So I think for us it was like, really displaying of like, let’s give them the space and this platform to observe them and the boys. I mean, they were the coolest! We had so much fun. It was so absurd, and they were like, “Oh, we want to come more now to clean the house!”
W SPOTLIGHT: Really? Oh, I love that.
DI LUCIANO: But yeah, I don’t know if you want to-
SCHWITTER: Yeah, I think then it was kind of important to also make a point that they are more than their jobs. And also their job…I think a lot of times, the problem is that people from different classes make films about people from the lower class and they kind of look through a very victimising glasses. Which I think is very problematic. And also, it’s like, for us, it was important that the film shows the reality. The political reality and the class reality. But it’s not just about that, and we’re not making a film that is kind of poverty porn or like a problem movie. Because I think that something that is a problem with political cinema is that a lot of people are fed up with just seeing problems repeated in cinema, even though it’s very important because it stimulates that conversation, but sometimes you need to package it differently. And you still can talk about the same things, but they’re just an underlying thread a bit.
W SPOTLIGHT: That’s exactly one of the things I admired so much about the film. Is that you do get you know, the political and speaking to the political, class, and sociological aspects…but at its core it has, there’s a lot of levity within the two groups. With Omar and Noah and Rosana and Lily, and it’s just, it’s speaking to some heavy themes, but the prominent feeling is community and warmth and humour, and just a lot of life at its core. Which was really exciting to watch.
SCHWITTER: Exactly. And that’s also them, you know. Because we, you know, said okay, let's make the wall, this wall oracle that they discover. We said, like, we kind of gave them settings or scenes, and now you discover the wall. You hear something. But the dialogue was never written, so everything kind of, the way that they cope with those settings and what happens in there, we never knew what was going to happen. So it gave them kind of really, a space and the humour and the light, warmth, comes from them. And I think the film would have been totally different with other...
DI LUCIANO: With other characters.
SCHWITTER: With other people, yeah.
DI LUCIANO: And I think kind of in this process, of filmmaking, whether it’s kind of important, it’s like, you need to trust a little bit, really, this belly feeling sometimes you have. Of like, even though it doesn’t happen at all, you have to really trust it. As well too, figure out like if you like those people in real life. In the way of like, hey, I want to spend some hours with you just talking, and observing you, and having a conversation. That, in a way, really makes something that then translates into the film. So I don’t know, for me they’re like really crazy, big characters in real life as well. I mean, I was always laughing when I was off-screen with them. Like cleaning and talking, I mean, I just love to see that.
SCHWITTER: They’re lovely.
DI LUCIANO: Yeah. I think like, in that way, we were a bit lucky as well that we found them.
W SPOTLIGHT: Absolutely.
SCHWITTER: Yeah. And they’re also like, what we wanted, what we searched a bit for. They’re politically very aware of their situation, and they talk about it a lot while cleaning, while also having a lot of humour. And I think they represent, really, a lot of people actually. I would say they are representative for a lot of people that do this job in Argentina, and also, I would even say Switzerland, when I looked into it. Because cleaning is always the thing that happens, and it’s very interesting work because it happens always on the margin. Because it’s like a work that you just see the results, but you mostly never see the people. So I find it very important to show the people in cinema that actually do this, you know?
W SPOTLIGHT: Absolutely. And to also kind of display them as you were both mentioning, in a way that it’s like, that they live full lives, they laugh, they have deep relationships. Like I think it’s very, just a wonderful story, and just a friendship that you see too, and that warmth that permeates the screen. Which was really lovely.
DI LUCIANO: Yeah, totally. Totally.
SCHWITTER: Yeah, I think what was then, I think a bit for us, why we wanted also to try out fiction is a bit to really give a swing to reality, a bit. And to also enter with our group into a playful country or a parallel world, you know? It’s like when making this film, every day you enact new stories, you kind of enter into a fictional reality to get there in a very playful way. For us, it was also important to, with this fiction, to create narratives that are not just the mirror to the world, but like to show a different world just for us. Like a lot of times, it feels the world is a bit on its head. Everywhere. We tried to kind of create a world, and we flipped it again on its head so that it’s maybe upright. Through that, it was also a very funny process. And I think that's also very important because I think what we do is a bit, what we called ‘cinema copine’, it’s like filmmaking with friends. All the people, we were a very small crew so most of the time it was just Agostina and me, doing camera, sound, directing, and then them in front of the camera. Sometimes, Martine would help holding the boom. So it was really a fun kind of friend group. Making this kind of summer project for one and a half months. This kind of fun also is very important because I think it’s a film that the process is just as important as the result. For us, it was kind of a transformative thing, spending so much time with them. Looking at the world with a different lens and just spending so much time with them. The same goes for them, because Noah now he always draws cameras and wants to become an actor or a filmmaker.
W SPOTLIGHT: Oh, that's amazing!
SCHWITTER: That was never on his periphery.
W SPOTLIGHT: And I think, the experience that you had, that's kind of what you hope for the most when creating any form of art. Is to be able to, you know, create the thing that you want to create and tell the story. But also, be able to have a kind of transformative, great experience. That’s kind of what makes it all worth it, I think!
SCHWITTER: Totally!
DI LUCIANO: I think I want to tell you exactly what you mentioned now. I was always finding it very funny, because I often feel like now, when you become a little bit more an adult like you’re always just like…talking with each other. Like you sit and you talk. And for me, even making this film was doing something altogether. I don’t know, it like really changed something. Like, how people start to relate again, or even the kind of connections you do. Like, with Rosana and Lily, for example, I was knowing them from working in the house, but I mean, like, through an experience together, we started to have a friendship as well. Because like, now we have something that we have in common as well. It’s like, you have to tell me something, and I tell you something. And it’s a little bit this liminal space. So I find that very interesting, like, yeah, how it can transform as well a bit into reality.
SCHWITTER: And then we have the wish that the film itself can maybe have an impact. But I think that’s very…it always remains super blurry, you know? To grasp that. But I think what happens of course, is that maybe people in the village that see the film they start talking more to each other. Like, even from different groups, like even the Escalantes and Lily and Ro, they were not super connected. They were also separate kinds of worlds, through this experience. “Oh, you were part of this crazy project from those two?” “I was the doctor.” And so it kind of starts to create their own group of people.
W SPOTLIGHT: That’s so nice how it’s brought people together.
SCHWITTER: Yeah, people who might not mix so much. And the same goes for, because we’ve now showed the film in Argentina twice, but not in Cordoba, in this region. But I think, even in Buenos Aires, it’s like, I mean, there are a lot of people that clean houses all the time, but it’s also not where people look the most. You know? It’s not a thing where people put their gaze on the most and reflect that. Plus, the reality of living in the rural region in Tierra is a totally different one from the city. So I think in that way it’s kind of miny, miny, miny impact, it may be that people reflect about it and look at those jobs differently. And think about life, think about history.
DI LUCIANO: Yeah.
W SPOTLIGHT: Well, I think that was certainly true to my experience watching the film. And I even left because I love, you know, I’m a big reader, I love reading, especially folklore from around the world, so this definitely like, I left and started researching different Argentine folklore and looking into the inspiration, and the different kinds of stories. So it’s definitely inspired tha,t and it’s amazing that it’s also inspired a sense of growing community, which I think is certainly a powerful thing about art.
SCHWITTER: I think so too. I think for us it’s also a bit why the title has, of course, many meanings, but for us, also, The World Upside Down, is also the world that exists there. They’re much more based in, as you say, community. A very different contact with nature and the surroundings, which in the cities is completely gone. And then also, I think, for us, it’s very important, I think a lot of societies in the west or a bit everywhere, but mostly in cities in the west, have this very kind of alienating aspect of them. People are more on the internet, they’re alone, they’re streaming, they’re doing this and that, but people don’t interact. I think there (Argentina), people interact. They tell each other stories. But a life, which I don’t want to romanticise, because we can also end up romanticising it, which is not only cool and not only nice. But they have things that are in other parts of the world, they are not there anymore. And I think that’s very interesting to look at that. And I think community is just something that is just very, very important for human beings. Storytelling always brings us together. If we have common stories, it brings us always together. Which I think is just such a human in its core, a human thing that’s been there always.
W SPOTLIGHT: Absolutely. And I think yeah, to agree and add on to that is I feel like, I was having a conversation the other day about, as you were exactly saying, here in Canada, where I can speak to. Since COVID, especially, we’ve kind of become so individualistic and solitary, and I feel like people do yearn for that sense of community. And are looking for that togetherness and I think that’s one of the amazing things about you know, film and art in general, and film festivals is you can kind of find that common ground and that shared experience and I think that’s why what you two are doing and what every filmmaker or storyteller is doing is so vital and so important because it's continuing this kind of tradition that's existed, and that we’ve loved forever.
SCHWITTER: I totally agree. And I think also what you always want, we were listening to a talk with Lucrecia Martel and what she is saying is like, as a filmmaker, what you want is in the end, you want your audience to start talking to each other. That’s the pure goal of every film. If it’s not just the entertainment, a thrill ride film. In the end, what you want is that the audience starts to interact with each other. Which means community. They share, they reflect, and I think that’s so vital, and I think what’s also vital is that we have stories nowadays that give us hope a bit again. Because we also read different philosophers, and one, Byung-Chul Han, is saying we are in a crisis of narration. We need again, narratives. I mean, especially the younger generation that maybe lives a bit longer on this planet, needs narratives. Give them a bit of hope to push forward, and I think that was very important for us. And it is a kind of hope-inspiring film. We also wanted to do that. Like, no, we don’t want to make the heavy movies. It’s not us. We want to make something that gives a bit of hope when you leave the cinema. And I think the cinema, and our world is full of heavy stories which, humans are this way, unfortunately, but we also need some hope again.
W SPOTLIGHT: We definitely need that kind of hopeful storytelling. It’s just as important as you said, as being truthful and, not that this isn’t truthful, but focusing on the more kind of, sad and sombre story. Both are necessary. I certainly left, I mean, I didn’t have anyone to talk about it with because I watched the screener by myself, and I was like, I wish I could talk to someone about this! So I’m so glad we’re getting to do this. It’s certainly a film that you just feel very light and, exactly as you said, hopeful afterwards. So I think, just to kind of ask maybe one more question, so you can enjoy the rest of your time in Montreal. We spoke about it a little bit, but maybe if we can just speak to it a little more, is that what you hope audiences take away from this experience?
DI LUCIANO: That’s a big question!
W SPOTLIGHT: I know, I’m sorry! Big question to end on!
SCHWITTER: I think for me, it’s also really that cinema that we can go back to where we started. It’s also a place where you dream. And I think what David Lynch did in his cinema is like, for us, it needs to be a space for you to dream collectively. And those collective dreams should be matching things that are not so limited by what our class, capitalistic system, the kind of limits that are given there. But it should exactly make us dream beyond these borders. And I think for that, I think it’s what then happens, or, what I hope happens is that people look at things in the world a bit differently. Or at least a bit more attentively. Which means like, they look at who is cleaning, and they also understand that that’s alive and a human being and a person that can be very intelligent. I think that's very important. But also reflect a bit about, or maybe get a bit more magic in life again. Things can have meaning if you want them to, and that change is possible if you believe in it. Those things are very important in the end. Those little gestures.
DI LUCIANO: Or sometimes as well, and with what Leon says, I completely agree. But sometimes, I mean, I think this is not a movie for everyone. It’s a slow movie. And sometimes I read and heard some comments like, “it was very boring, and nothing happened”. And actually, I really like when people say that, because even if the feeling is like to be bored, because maybe if like you are in this world where you are always having something to do. And now you sit for an hour, and you get bored. For me, that's a very nice experience as well. Of course, it's not what I hope that people feel, but even if it causes like a certain way of like falling asleep, being bored or something. For me, it’s a very interesting like re-thinking why that really happened or maybe why you couldn't see those small things where actually a lot is happening. And maybe you need exactly that to, like, let it go and just observe, and maybe you start discovering things. So, I think for me as well, it’s cool that they are able to discover and play a bit with it. Really, with just maybe, little things.
SCHWITTER: Yeah, I think it’s the little stories that also are important, and that you don’t see so often in cinema, but it’s the little stories that are the majority of the world. The majority of the world and the lives are those little stories which I think make them so fucking important. And I think when that is boring because it’s not the big dramaturgic arc, like people are dying, and it’s a different perception. For us, it’s interesting and important.
W SPOTLIGHT: Yeah, and those are like the stories that make up a huge population of the world. They’re real. They’re people you see every day. (These stories), make up our world.
SCHWITTER: Exactly, exactly.
DI LUCIANO: Totally.
SCHWITTER: For that, I just think, I hope that people just look at those stories after watching our film, and maybe see them more around them. And I think a film also, you make it as a kind of time capturing, because in a film, in the end, a document. Because for us, it’s also something that, why we make films is, for now. But also a bit too, that later on I love to watch old films, and I find it fascinating how life was. I also find it fascinating to talk about this film, maybe in twenty years, and see where the world has gone then, and where Argentina is then.
DI LUCIANO: What I always ask myself is a bit like, what kind of audience are reaching? Because of course, sometimes it’s a movie I really love, for maybe like, the art scene and people that understand about cinema. Sometimes I ask myself for the movie we’re going to make, openers cinema in the village where, for example, people don’t come from this. Like getting used to those kinds of movies, this kind of art. For me, that’s something I’m looking forward to very much. To see like what they think, what they see, and what are the reactions. Because sometimes I’m wondering like, what it would be if like a lot of people who are cleaning houses, what it would be like if they were watching. And sadly, I think like, I don’t know if someone who saw it works in this field, for example. But I will be very much interested about that. Right? So I think as well it will be very beautiful if it will not just stay in the bubble.
W SPOTLIGHT: Well, I think certainly that it’s amazing that it’s premiered in Montreal, I mean, I’m so lucky to have been able to watch it through W Spotlight because it introduced me to a whole new world of stories and folklore, and I want to be able to read into that more and see more of those stories. So thank you so much!
DI LUCIANO: If you are interested, we can send you a list as well of a lot of reading.
W SPOTLIGHT: That would be amazing, yeah!
SCHWITTER: We go crazy over stories here. Because we were walking around the city, and the history is all so rich. And richer with the Native origins and about colonisation. There must be a lot, a lot of stories.
W SPOTLIGHT: Yes, very powerful stories. And I can also send some novels or, if you want any ideas, suggestions.
DI LUCIANO: Yes!
SCHWITTER: Actually, in an hour or so, we want to go to the Musée des Beaux-Arts to watch the Kent Monkman. Like, the Indigenous painter that imagines huge, queer art, and with colonisation.
W SPOTLIGHT: Oh, that sounds incredible.
DI LUCIANO: Yeah, it's in the Musée des Beaux-Arts.
W SPOTLIGHT: That sounds amazing. I wish I lived closer to Montreal. I’m in Windsor, Ontario. So I’m pretty far from there.
DI LUCIANO: Maybe one day, when you’re here.
W SPOTLIGHT: I hope so! Well, thank you so much for making time for me and chatting.
SCHWITTER: It’s our pleasure.
W SPOTLIGHT: Well, I loved it! And I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in Montreal. Congratulations on an amazing film.
DI LUCIANO: Thank you so much for making time for us.
SCHWITTER: Yes, thank you.
W SPOTLIGHT: Oh, it was wonderful. I loved it, and it was so nice to meet both of you.
DI LUCIANO: You too! If you ever want to come to Argentina or Switzerland, just let us know!
SCHWITTER: Oh yeah, just write us!
W SPOTLIGHT: I would love that! Both of those places! And if you’re ever in Windsor, let me know! Have a great day!
SCHWITTER: Thank you so much! Bye!
DI LUCIANO: Thank you so much! Bye!
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