“The key to producing such a long and fragile film is maintaining an energy similar to love, which unites the team and allows them to face uncertainty without losing the essence or becoming a rigid industrial production.”
Producing a film over nearly a decade, in such fragile contexts as Paraguay and Argentina, sounds almost heroic. What was the most challenging part of sustaining that involvement for so many years?
In my case, it wasn’t ten years — I came on board as producer a little later. Clarisa, Lucas, and Liz, from the Corrientes–Paraguay collective Yaguá Pirú, had been filming since 2015, even before I met them; I joined in 2019, just a few months before the pandemic. From the moment I met Clarisa, we became very close friends, and she would always talk to me about Ángel. One day she showed me some of what they had filmed so that I could put a face and a voice to this boy from her stories, and I remember that as soon as I started watching the footage, I was moved to tears. I think the feeling she had upon meeting him goes beyond the image and reaches anyone who experiences that scene. And that’s what happened to me.
When it comes to processes that are so long and demanding — because they require the people involved to repeatedly suspend their daily lives, travel, and in some way disrupt the inertia of their days — I think it’s absolutely essential to have a very strong original driving force that, time and again, draws the group back together and reignites them. This is an energetic quality that often happens in cinema. And it undoubtedly resembles love.
So, in a way, I never felt I was “sustaining” an involvement, nor that I was collaborating on something that belonged to “a director,” and even less that it was difficult to do so. It was inevitable, like love. I had been invited to be part of something that had me completely captivated, and I was already in it — just like the others, and just like Ángel himself.
In a previous interview, Clarisa spoke of “a film that doesn’t follow industrial molds.” From a production standpoint, how do you balance that creative freedom with the demands of financing, co-productions, and schedules that often ask for the opposite?
In production terms, what I just described as my point of entry into the project had a very concrete and material counterpart: the partnership between Gentil Cine (my production company) and Yaguá Pirú, built on horizontal terms. Of course, we each had some different tasks and responsibilities, and of course there were moments in that way of producing that led to grey areas, stress, and even disagreements. But the starting point of the project was so clear and compelling that we always found a way to reshuffle the deck and start again.
I always told Clarisa and Lucas that my biggest fear over time with this film was becoming that detached producer in Buenos Aires, sitting at a desk, handling payments, reporting on funds, and saying “yes” or “no.” Luckily, we fought against that, and we succeeded. There was never a rigid, top-down structure where “my side” provided the money and logistics, and the “technical team” side simply executed pre-agreed tasks to return with whatever was needed from each shoot. That’s not how it happened, and I think that’s why we were able to sustain a process that, as Clarisa rightly said, doesn’t follow industrial molds.
That’s not how I approach any project — and especially not this one, a documentary that involved building a relationship with a child, and later a teenager, in a territory as pulled and strained as any Latin American border, over such a long period. I wanted to be there. I wanted to be close. There was too much uncertainty to miss out on!
We were a small community (Ángel included) that traveled, played, danced, ate, talked about very personal things, even argued — and sometimes, we filmed. I say “sometimes” because that’s where the main difficulty lay: filming was not the central activity, and the footage we gathered didn’t have an obvious place in the puzzle that would become the film. There was no way of knowing whether we were far from the end, close to it, or if the final cut would even catch up with the present moment we were in each time.
Managing the money, figuring out the right time to approach co-producers, and even translating the film’s needs into the language of funding bodies was particularly difficult for that reason — and at the same time, absolutely essential. None of us involved in this film are wealthy, far from it, and it was vital to try to bring resources to the project so that it could keep going. Because paying for each trip out of our own pockets, putting our lives and other jobs on hold for one or two weeks at a time — not to mention post-production: locking yourself away to edit a film like this for months, without an editor and without resources — was simply not going to be feasible.
I think sometimes being a producer requires you to be a kind of double agent. In a way, you have to know how to take the elements from the real film that can capture attention and make the project legible to funds and institutions — without breaking their rules — while always keeping in mind that those funds should serve the real film, the one that is fragile and has no defined form, without forcing it into a mold or betraying it. Without a doubt, there are periods when being in the crossfire of those opposing forces becomes difficult — especially when you enter political moments like the one we’re in now, where we face a huge amount of misunderstanding about our work, and prejudice.
What was the key strategy to keep the film alive when it seemed it might be left unfinished? What alliances or decisions were decisive in reaching the end?
I never really thought the film would be left unfinished. I did think it might happen that, out of those ten years, six would end up in the final cut and we’d have a film about childhood without reaching adolescence — or that it would take us longer to get it post-produced, with all the bureaucratic hurdles that entails. But I think I always had a very strong conviction that this film would be finished.
That said, post-production was definitely the stage that scared me the most in economic terms. We had already grown used to the uncertainty of “shooting” — if we can even call it that — but post-production was a challenge because, in a way, it meant taking our precious, beloved chaos back into a terrain closer to the industry. It meant bringing in more people, and given the amount of material we had, we knew it was going to be long (and the longer, the more expensive). We also knew it was important to achieve both a sensitive synthesis and professional technical quality so that all those years could vibrate joyfully within the film and be felt by an audience who hadn’t been there.
A film shot with minimal technical means, in my view, cannot repeat that same approach in post-production — it risks ending up talking only to itself. Concretely, we needed more than a year and a half of editing, carried out in different stages, six months of sound post-production, and several weeks of conforming, color correction, and complex deliveries, due both to the film’s length and the fact that it is divided into two parts.
In this sense, the role of Invasión Cine — a Colombian production company specialized in documentary — was key. They secured support from their national film fund for El príncipe de Nanawa, and with that, we were able to cover the costs of post-production and the final trips, which took place between June and September 2024.
I think something we did unconsciously — but which proved very useful — was staggering the funding. We didn’t ask for everything at once, nor did we seek funds to cover every single budget item. Given the length of the process, and the fact that funding bodies, as you mentioned in your previous question, have timeline restrictions, financing began with development funds from the FNA, the Fondec (Paraguayan fund through our Paraguayan co-producer Tekoha Audiovisual), and Ibermedia. It continued with production funds like INCAA and Ibermedia for co-production, and ended with the Colombian fund Proimágenes for the final stage of shooting and post-production.
This way, each fund effectively marked a stage in the film’s production, with its own terms, conditions, and deliverables that Gentil committed to. Of course, we ran into problems, but we also had great allies within those very institutions — people who guided us, again and again, to find ways of staying within the expected framework even while we were in the middle of a very atypical process. Fortunately, there are “double agents” everywhere.
From your experience, what differences do you see between producing a fiction film — with its more defined timelines and planning — and sustaining such a long, open-ended documentary project like El príncipe de Nanawa, which involved following a real story for almost a decade?
The truth is, I’ve never really produced a fiction film with highly pre-defined timelines either — maybe I’m just not good at that, or maybe the directors I work with aren’t. Films always seem to need another turn of the wheel; over time they evolve, they grow, ideas that seemed firm months earlier get questioned, and in my experience, the process always ends up being longer or requiring resources and partnerships that weren’t planned from the start.
I’ve never lived the experience of taking a script, applying to funds for a year or two at most, securing the full budget, shooting the proposed script in four weeks, editing in ten, post-producing, premiering — and that’s it. I’ve never done that, except perhaps as part of the crew. Before starting Gentil Cine, I was head of production on several films, including One in a Thousand, and only then did I feel I was able to relate to cinema in an orderly way — with a beginning and an end, clear goals, clear successes, clear mistakes.
Maybe it’s something I still have to learn, or maybe it’s a matter of principle — almost an aesthetic one — in the way I produce. Uncertainty and risk are always the driving forces behind the projects I take on. I like porous scripts, the kind that leave space for a bit of chance and for reality to break into the shoot more easily. In that sense, the case of El príncipe — with its length and openness — wasn’t so far removed from my way of working, nor did it feel unnatural.
Do you think the audiovisual community is managing to come together and respond collectively to this critical moment? What regional or international alliances could be key?
I think Argentina’s audiovisual and filmmaking community is immense. This is thanks to public education, to our history, and to years of sustained public funding. And for that reason, our community is made up of very diverse sectors — ideologically, geographically, socially, and so on. In a way, that’s what makes us so strong and so recognizable around the world, and at the same time, it’s a big challenge when it comes to building articulation and strong collective responses. It’s not easy to rally behind a common voice without losing the singularities and dissenting positions that are precisely what make us strong.
I think there’s something in this “critical moment,” as you call it, that must serve to unite us more, to look at problems clearly and honestly, without forgetting anyone and without placing ourselves above anyone. Beyond everything that’s happening with this government — and in particular with the current administration of the INCAA — we have, for decades, had a major Achilles’ heel, or rather two: the preservation of our cinema and its distribution.
These are two areas of our work that, for many years now and by mistake, have not been a priority for those of us who make films. And yet I firmly believe they are the two key elements that justify the need for public support. If we don’t watch our own cinema, if our films don’t reach the whole country, if audiences don’t acquire a taste for watching national films, and if the wonderful, monumental works of our past are left to rot in some basement waiting for Fernando Martín Peña or another hero to rescue them… then what value are we giving to what we make today?
I see a hidden, corrosive link between the neglect with which the industry treats finished films and the disdain and neglect we get from those who should be fostering our cinema. And I think that’s a clue to where we should be moving together as a community right now.
In this context of budget cuts and defunding of the cultural sector, what concrete risks do you see for Argentine cinema — especially for independent projects and long processes like El príncipe de Nanawa?
I actually think that in this context, almost only projects like this can exist. Think about it: El príncipe de Nanawa went through four different governments. It’s a long-term film, one of persistence, patience, and uncertainty… crisis and instability are part of its aesthetic. Not because I romanticize crisis or instability, but because I’m aware that we’ve always made great films despite them.
I say this because I think we must always demand more, unite more, and ask for more — but we also have to step away from those defeatist narratives that only lead to impotence, rigidity, and depression. The right wing wants that. Austerity measures want that: for us to feel defeated, to stop, to stop creating, to lose our humor and our capacity for action. I believe that shouldn’t stop anyone. I don’t say this from an omnipotent or denialist place — I say it fully aware that they are making our lives brutally difficult.
But I also know that the fertile ground for cinema, or for any art form, has rarely in history required stability, calm, or consensus. There are times when it will be minimally easier, and times like now when it will be much harder. But going back to what I said earlier, the real risk for Argentine cinema, for me, lies in the loss of audience engagement.
This has to do with many things: from a lack of knowledge about our cinematic past, to the fierce colonizing efforts coming at us from all sides urging us to only look outward, to the lack of adequate distribution and exhibition channels. I think this is our biggest threat. If the Argentine people had rushed to defend the INCAA and other cultural institutions the way they did with public education or public health, we wouldn’t be in this situation, nor would we feel like we’re fighting alone.
That’s why I think we have to become aware of this and prepare ourselves so that next time, we’re not so easily demonized or abandoned in our work. Because that’s the other thing: governments come and go — culture stays. You can’t wipe out a country’s culture or national art in a single presidential term, or even in two or ten. Our real threat lies in what is brewing in the popular imagination. And I think we need to pay much closer attention to that.
In a global context where festivals are increasingly competitive, how do you see the reception of Argentine cinema in the world today? What opportunities remain, and which ones are closing?
I think the reception of Argentine cinema in general is very good, as it has always been. What’s undeniable is that much less is being produced now, at a time when other countries in the region — like Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, Mexico, or Brazil — are producing much more. That’s why partnering with regional countries whenever possible, and pulling together for the sake of the film, can truly make the biggest difference for artisanal, distinctive cinema.
It’s very hard to break into the market and current trends when you finish an “unclassifiable” film and there’s no money left for distribution. That’s why you have to set realistic goals and find allies who understand the film you’ve made.
In the case of El príncipe de Nanawa, its main production value and appeal lies in time — ten years is not something that goes unnoticed, nor is it common to see. In contrast, one of its “weaknesses” from a marketing standpoint is its length. That scares off many distributors and sales agents. So what we did was choose a documentary-focused festival for the premiere, knowing that programmers and audiences there would be more likely to value it and embrace its duration.
Of course, it’s not always the case that you want that and then you’re invited by Visions du Réel to compete internationally and win Best Film — that was our best possible scenario, almost unimaginable. But I do think you have to aim for achievable goals, rather than spending years on the circuit hoping for an invitation from an A-list festival when not all films are meant for that (thankfully).
The other thing happening is that distributors are increasingly reluctant to bet on unconventional cinema. It’s no longer common, as it was six or seven years ago, for sales agents to put money down in advance for the rights to an auteur film. So I think it’s crucial now, in such a segmented and competitive moment, to set goals that truly match the film you have. It’s the old “lion’s tail or mouse’s head” question. For me, it’s mouse’s head, always.
And in any case, to learn how to do the work: submit to festivals, research independent circuits in other countries, get the contacts, and write to them one by one as a producer until the film’s path begins to open. I’ve done this with many films I’ve produced, and I’m doing it now with El príncipe de Nanawa. It’s a lot of work, yes, but it’s also rewarding — and it allows you to accompany the film much more closely.
Jueves 5 y 19 de febrero / 20hs
ARTHAUS / Bartolomé Mitre 434. CABA
Director: Abbas Fahdel / 2025
Selecciones: Locarno 2025 (Ganadora Mejor Dirección) – DocLisboa – Tallinn Black Nights – Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival – Viennale – El Gouna Film Festival – Seminici
