“It’s not for us.” Anybody who has ever pitched a film has heard these phrases. However when Luis Ortega was in search of financing for his newest characteristic, the surrealist, gender-bending Kill the Jockey, he heard it lots.
It didn’t matter that Ortega’s work had been making waves in Argentine cinema since his first characteristic, 2003’s Caja Negra, or that his prior characteristic, El Angel, competed in Un Sure Regard in Cannes in 2019. Kill the Jockey, a couple of jockey whose id — already fragmented by trauma, medicine and alcohol — repeatedly transforms following a racing accident and its accompanying head harm, was simply too esoteric.
“This film is just not pitchable,” Ortega admits.
One other potential cause for all these passes? “Pineapple Head. That’s [what] the movie was known as,” Ortega says, alluding to a homeless man in Buenos Aires who — strolling across the metropolis in a fur coat, one sandal and one lady’s high-heeled shoe, a purse on his arm and a large pineapple-shaped bandage on his head — partly impressed the movie.
“It sounds higher in Spanish: cabeza de piña,” Ortega says. “That’s one factor I did form of surrender on, as a result of everyone was like, ‘Luis, you wish to do that movie. Nobody, nobody, desires to do it. However when you name it Pineapple Head, you undoubtedly received’t movie this, like, ever.’ ”
Ortega compromised on the title, however he bought the final snigger. Jockey received the Horizons Award on the San Sebastián Worldwide Movie Competition after screening in competitors on the Venice Worldwide Movie Competition. Protagonist Photos is dealing with gross sales on the AFM.
Ortega was unwilling, nevertheless, to compromise on his imaginative and prescient of protagonist Remo Manfredini (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) and his dreamlike journey towards self-realization, which entails attempting to evade his mobster boss, obsessively weighing himself in drugstores and reworking right into a pert feminine jail inmate named Dolores. Not that Jockey provides up any simple solutions in regards to the nature of id. If something, the arc of Manfredini’s story is extra like a magical wheel the place with each revolution, one persona dies and one other is born — and hopefully every new id inches nearer to the reality of who he actually is.
“In a means, each character is a jail. It doesn’t matter what character you construct, you’re caught; you’re caught up in some form of definition of what that character is,” Ortega says. “So I consider you need to kill each single one in every of your characters to be free.”
Ortega discovered inspiration in a lesser-known work by Jack London, the 1915 novel The Star Rover. Within the e-book, a college professor named Darrell Standing is serving a life sentence in San Quentin State Jail and is made to put on “the jacket,” a painful compression machine that real-life prisoners have been made to put on as punishment. The excruciating ache pushes him right into a trance state the place he experiences a few of his previous lives.
“He’s in ecstasy as a result of, he mentioned, ‘They’ll’t kill my immortality, they’ll’t strangle my immortality, irrespective of how a lot they torture me,’ ” Ortega says. “And I assumed that was so nice. I assumed that that’s what occurs with [Manfredini]. It form of converts into this character the place he’s a person, he’s a jockey, he’s a drug addict, he’s a person, he’s a drifter, he’s a girl, he’s the mom of these children on the street — all these potentialities are actual and [possibly] true.
“I don’t know in the event that they’re actual,” he provides. “However they’re true.”