The Cannes Film Festival will pay tribute to the late Argentine filmmaker Fernando “Pino” Solanas with the screening this Thursday of his posthumous film “Three adrift of the creative act”, within the framework of the Cannes Classics section of the Official Selection and with the presence of the filmmaker’s children and former partner.
The “Pino” Solanas film was made entirely by him but premiered after his death -in November 2020 in Paris- with a premiere at the Mar del Plata Film Festival, where it was the opening film last year.
“Three adrift…” is the meeting between Solanas himself with the actor, playwright and psychoanalyst Eduardo “Tato” Pavlovsky and the plastic artist Luis Felipe “Yuyo” Noé, three active protagonists of Argentine culture in recent decades and friends since youth, united by a generation and absolute creative freedom when facing their artistic and political work.
With a career that includes inescapable titles in the history of Argentine cinema, both in documentaries such as “The hour of the ovens” (1968), “Memory of looting” (2004) and “Journey to the fumigated towns” (2018); and fiction, among which are “The children of Fierro” (1975), “El exilio de Gardel” (1985) or “Sur” (1988), the latest film by Pino Solanas stands on the necessary reading of chaos to reach to the sought-after work, to later give an account of his political commitment, exile and the difficulties he had to overcome throughout his life.
Solanas is an old friend of Cannes. His first documentary “The time of the ovens” -prohibited in Argentina during the dictatorial period from 1966 to 1973- was presented at the French festival in 1969 in La Semana de la Crítica; in 1988 he won Best Director of the contest for “Sur” and in 1992 he competed for the Palme d’Or with “El viaje”.
To talk about this tribute, Télam spoke in Cannes with his children Victoria (who was the film’s producer) and Juan (director, who recorded some shots and defined the color) and who was his partner in the last long years of his life, the Brazilian Angela Correa.
Télam: How do you take this Cannes tribute to Pino?
Angela Correa: For me it’s something very emotional, we traveled here together many times, the first was 30 years ago with “El viaje” and then almost all the festivals, so I feel a void but, at the same time, it’s like having him close because I came on the plane to here and I listened to Pino telling me intimate things about us, like he told me “I also asked for the white one that I want to try”; So there are so many memories like “we sat here, we stopped at this hotel, we took such and such a photo here”, which is something that moves me a lot and with which I am happy, with my heart beating strong. There is like a void but filled with the presence of Pino.
Juan Solanas: It seems sad to me, but it is also true that he was so vital that he was like a young man of 84 years, it is not that I was left with the image of a dull and old Pino, but that he was always full, I did not know to another but to that one with 20 projects at the same time, burning the heads of the people of Unesco so that such a thing would come out. A vitality of him and of those other two young people who appear and that the film transmits but concretely. Today, tomorrow, when we present the film, I am going to feel sadness, even though the tribute seems beautiful to me and that it is in Cannes, which is the great film festival. He was always a full-fledged guy, with a lot of humor and always trying to enjoy himself rather than suffer, and also a very optimistic approach because both in movies and in politics, if he’s not optimistic, nothing happens.
Angela Correa: Pope Francis told him that he had “accumulated youth”, as accumulated from other lives, he told him months before he died when we went to visit him at the Vatican.
Juan Solanas: It’s just that he was a superactive guy, he was already planning a new fiction that he had started writing before he died.
Victoria Solanas: being here on the one hand is beautiful, because it is an important international tribute, but it is also strong because it is strong to relive everything again. And I share that we received from him a very important legacy of vitality, a strong relationship with passion and commitment. I also believe that the fact that in this edition of Cannes it is the only Argentine feature film that is screened has to do with his will to live, something of that strength, it is like a tribute to a guy who always fought for the impossible. Always also standing up for a plural cinema, for an identity of its own, immense legacy things that for a daughter, like me, are very big. She clearly put her body and her life at the disposal of her ideals, her projects, her passion and for her cinema.
Télam: How was the process of finishing the film?
Victoria: He finished the entire film, in fact two days before he died he decided to change the title, which had millions of versions. If it hadn’t been for the pandemic, I would premiere it live and then, with the pandemic, we waited to premiere it so that it would be with the public.
Télam: :Did you participate in the film?
Victoria: We all participate because we are, I did the production, then Juan filmed, he did one of the cameras.
Juan: When you were there, I would grab you by hand, give you a camera and that way you would find out that you were going to grab a camera, have a glass of wine and film, not that I or Gaspar (Noé) were the cameramen. And in post-production I did the color , he had also done it in the last ones.
Télam: It also seems to me that the film has to do with a certain Argentina, with a time when these people start out, with a spirit, what you were saying, a generational spirit that later some supported and others did not.
Juan: An outstanding generation, they are a generation that you begin to grasp in science and in everything and you have an incredible brilliance. They were very free, the three who appear in the film, people who paved the way, very educated too, I see them as a generation of giants, with an immense culture, very thoughtful, very militant in doing what needs to be done beyond the personal calculation and where there is no wall that stops or resists you.
Victoria: I love it when Yuyo (Noé) says: “I had many crises, in the first one I stopped painting for 9 years because I said if this is sold like chocolate something is wrong”. Nine years without painting, it’s not a joke.
Juan: It was people who lived as they thought today there are a lot of tututu and then nothing to see, it’s not that they went with a little verse next to something else, it was a very powerful generation. And another thing that he had is that he was very modern, in 2001 he was a filmmaker and he immediately understood that new technologies could give you the freedom to do things almost without financing, before filming three minutes was 200 to 300 dollars of film and same development and rental of cameras. It’s like he adopted a youtuber language before youtubers existed, if he hadn’t had that ability he wouldn’t have been able to film everything he filmed in those years.
Victoria: I feel the film as a legacy, as a farewell to him and his other two friends, that seems very nice to me.
