AFM Hidden Gem: ‘Eliminate the Jockey’ Provides a Surreal Meditation on the Nature of Identity

” It’s not for us.” Anybody who has actually ever pitched a motion picture has actually heard those words. However when Luis Ortega was trying to find funding for his newest function, the surrealist, gender-bending Eliminate the Jockey, he heard it a lot

It didn’t matter that Ortega’s work had actually been making waves in Argentine movie theater considering that his very first function, 2003’s Caja Negra, or that his previous function, El Angel, contended in Un Specific Regard in Cannes in 2019. Eliminate the Jockey, about a jockey whose identity– currently fragmented by injury, alcohol and drugs– consistently changes following a racing mishap and its accompanying head injury, was simply too mystical.

” This motion picture is not pitchable,” Ortega confesses.

Another possible factor for all those passes? “ Pineapple Head. That’s [what] the movie was called,” Ortega states, mentioning a homeless male in Buenos Aires who– walking the city in a fur coat, one shoe and one female’s high-heeled shoe, a purse on his arm and a huge pineapple-shaped plaster on his head– partially motivated the movie.

” It sounds much better in Spanish: cabeza de piña,” Ortega states. “That’s something I did type of quit on, since everyone resembled, ‘Luis, you wish to do this movie. Nobody, nobody, wishes to do it. However if you call it Pineapple Head, you certainly will not movie this, like, ever.'”

Ortega jeopardized on the title, however he got the ultimate victory. Jockey won the Horizons Award at the San Sebastián International Movie Celebration after evaluating in competitors at the Venice International Movie Celebration. Lead character Pictures is dealing with sales at the AFM.

Ortega hesitated, nevertheless, to jeopardize on his vision of lead character Remo Manfredini (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) and his dreamlike journey towards self-realization, which includes attempting to avert his mobster employer, fanatically weighing himself in pharmacies and changing into a pert female jail prisoner called Dolores. Not that Jockey provides any simple responses about the nature of identity. If anything, the arc of Manfredini’s story is more like a wonderful wheel where with every transformation, one personality passes away and another is born– and ideally each brand-new identity inches more detailed to the reality of who he truly is.

” In a manner, every character is a jail. No matter what character you develop, you’re captured; you’re captured up in some type of meaning of what that character is,” Ortega states. “So I think you need to eliminate each and every single among your characters to be complimentary.”.

Ortega discovered motivation in a lesser-known work by Jack London, the 1915 book The Star Rover In the book, a university teacher called Darrell Standing is serving a life sentence in San Quentin State Jail and is made to use “the coat,” an unpleasant compression gadget that real-life detainees were made to use as penalty. The unbearable discomfort presses him into a hypnotic trance state where he experiences a few of his previous lives.

” He remains in euphoria since, he stated, ‘They can’t eliminate my immortality, they can’t strangle my immortality, no matter just how much they abuse me,'” Ortega states. “And I believed that was so fantastic. I believed that that’s what occurs with[Manfredini] It type of converts into this character where he’s a guy, he’s a jockey, he’s an addict, he’s a guy, he’s a drifter, he’s a female, he’s the mom of those kids in the street– all those possibilities are genuine and [possibly] real.

” I do not understand if they’re genuine,” he includes. “However they hold true.”