“It's not for us.” Anyone who has ever pitched a film has heard those words. But when Luis Ortega was looking for financing for his latest feature film, the surrealist, gender-bending Kill the jockeyhe heard it Very.
It didn't matter that Ortega's work had been making waves in Argentine cinema since his first feature film in 2003. Caja Negraor that its previous characteristic, The Angelparticipated in Un certain Regard in Cannes in 2019. Kill the jockeyabout a jockey whose identity – already fragmented by trauma, drugs and alcohol – transforms repeatedly following a racing accident and subsequent head injury, was simply too esoteric.
“This film is not feasible,” admits Ortega.
Another potential reason for all those steps? “Pineapple head. This is it [what] the film was called,” says Ortega, alluding to a homeless man from Buenos Aires who – walking around the city in a fur coat, a sandal and a woman's heeled shoe, a handbag on his arm and a giant pineapple-shaped bandage on his head – partly inspired the film.
“It sounds better in Spanish: fin head” says Ortega. “This is something I gave up on, because everyone said: 'Luis, you want to make this movie. Nobody, Nobodyhe wants to do it. But if you call him Pineapple headyou will definitely never turn it over.' “
Ortega compromised on the title, but he had the last laugh. Jockey won the Orizzonti Award at the San Sebastián International Film Festival after being screened in competition at the Venice International Film Festival. Protagonist Pictures is handling sales at AFM.
Ortega, however, was unwilling to compromise his vision of protagonist Remo Manfredini (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) and his dreamlike journey to self-realization, which involves trying to evade his mafia boss, obsessively weighing himself in pharmacies and transform into an impertinent women's prison. inmate named Dolores. Not that Jockey offers easy answers about the nature of identity. If anything, Manfredini's story arc is more like a magic wheel where with each revolution, one character dies and another is born – and hopefully each new identity gets closer and closer to the truth of who he really is.
“In a way, every character is a prison. No matter what character you build, you're hooked; you're trapped in some sort of definition of what that character is,” Ortega says. “So I guess you have to kill each of your characters to be free.”
Ortega found inspiration in a lesser-known work by Jack London, the 1915 novel The Star Rover. In the book, a college professor named Darrell Standing is serving a life sentence at San Quentin State Prison and is made to wear “the jacket,” a painful compression device that real-life prisoners had to wear as punishment. The excruciating pain pushes him into a trance state in which he relives some of his past lives.
“He's ecstatic because, he said, 'They can't kill my immortality, they can't strangle my immortality, no matter how much they torture me,'” Ortega says. “And I thought it was fantastic. I thought that's what happens with [Manfredini]. She kind of transforms into this character where she's a man, she's a jockey, she's a drug addict, she's a man, she's a tramp, she's a woman, she's the mother of those kids on the street – all of these possibilities are real and [possibly] REAL.
“I don't know if they're real,” he adds. “But they're true.”