Thursday, March 28

Juan Diego Botto: “Anti-feminism, xenophobia or nationalism are alibis to defend the great economic powers”


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The actor, who is now making his debut as a director with ‘On the Margins’, reflects on commitment, politics, art and the right to anger… and to housing

The actor and director Juan Diego Botto.BERNARDO DAZ
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Juan Diego Botto (Buenos Aires, 1975) it has taken a lifetime to find his true calling. Convinced of being an actor even before he was born (it is not for nothing that he is the son of the acting teacher Cristina Rota), he now has doubts. His debut as a director, accompanied by Penlope Cruz as producer and protagonist, he discovers who he wants to serve a deep voice, a deep look and, best of all, a true sense of pain.In the margins’ It is a film committed and convinced of the place it occupies, which is none other than the correct one, always at a prudent distance from the most pathetic of its partners: cynicism. It’s a movie, but because of its attitude and clarity it could well be a simple scream. Her argument is also her complaint: the reality, which is also hell, of evictions.

Are evictions an excuse to make movies or is cinema a tool to denounce evictions?
Neither one nor the other. One ends up talking about what moves and excites him. If instead of taking care of your real interests you work for simple interest, which is not the same, the thing does not work. It has to be a natural process, it can never be artificial. A filmmaker who loves westerns, the best he can do is a western. And the same goes for science fiction or, as is my case, drama.
In this case, there is also a social, vital and even political interest. It is not just an interest in a cinematographic genre or a concern of an aesthetic nature.
Yes, but art cannot be conditioned by a proclamation. We knew the stories that are narrated in the film and we stayed there, with them. As one of the characters says, as soon as you know what is happening with the evictions, you can no longer look the other way. It’s a bit like ‘Matrix‘, you take the pill you take and there’s no going back. The cinema that I like, entertains me, worries me and excites me is precisely this one. I see ‘Class‘, by Laurent Cantet, or I see ‘120 beats per minute’, by Robin Campillo, or I see ‘My name is Joe, of Ken Loach, and I feel appealed. I recognize myself in this type of cinema as the cinema that it is, not as a political artifact.
Everything that cinema cites is not only committed to reality, but also aspires to change it. Loach’s case is explicit and has been since his first film.
Reality always beats you. can with you I remember that when I wrote the script with Olga Rodríguez, who is a journalist, we always reached a point where she said: ‘That’s it, we already have enough information. The rest we can cover with our imagination’. I had that anxiety to finish. And just at that moment we always found out something, a new development of the story emerged, which far exceeded our expectations and left what we had thought ridiculous. The reality turned out to be much more interesting than anything you could imagine.
The fact that reality is stranger than fiction…
The only problem with reality is that sometimes it is not plausible. I remember once in a play when a classmate hit me and I passed out. But I really fainted. Then regain consciousness and carry on normally. When the play was over, a friend who knew the text perfectly approached me and told me: ‘Everything is fine except for the fainting, which is not credible.’ That happens with evictions. Reality is so brutal that to make the story believable you have to tame reality.
His admired Loach maintained that capitalism has turned the inadmissible into normal…
I can’t agree more. One of the recurring questions I’ve been asked since we started the project is if I wasn’t talking about something from the past. And no, the reality is that evictions are a thing of the present. They happen every day. It has become chronic to the point of ceasing to be news. And yet, the strange thing is that it is precisely what happens every day that defines us as a society. Inequality defines our reality. The accumulation of wealth in few hands defines our world. The inescapable fact that there are many people right now who are starving to the point of death is the most relevant thing of our time. And all this has ceased to be news. The housing problem defines poverty in our country. Who is being evicted right now? Well, people who earn 1,100 euros a month, have two dependent children and the rent has risen to 750. They have 350 left to support their family. We live, as Loach says, with the inadmissible.
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The Minister of Equality, Irene Montero talks with the actor and director Juan Diego Botto, upon arrival at the premiere of the film
The Minister for Equality, Irene Montero talks with the actor and director Juan Diego Botto, upon her arrival at the premiere of the film ‘En los mrgenes’.JUANJO MARTINEFE

In the end, I know he wants to change the world.
I am satisfied with contributing to the debate and with those who go to see the films leaving it with a few questions.
Much of his earlier work speaks of exiles who are nothing more than homeless people, just like the evicted…
I remember when I finished writing ‘A moonless night’I said to myself proudly: “I have finally written about something different”. The play about Lorca was a play about Spain, not about exile or immigration or Argentina. Time later, almost a year later, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, the director, asked me to write a paragraph in which he would tell what was going on. And that’s when I realized that I had actually written about a missing person. Each one has the obsessions of him. When I arrived in Spain fleeing with my family from the Argentine dictatorship, I came with my mother alone, exiled, and with three children. There was a time when we were also evicted living from house to house of friends. I imagine that I am condemned to talk about that and to talk about my mother, about mothers. They are always the ones who end up taking charge of everything. That too is in the movie.
You are saying that the life of today’s evicted people is, in a way, their own history…
somehow. Losing the house is the biggest of cancellations. It does not allow you to be anything, you cannot develop any expectation of the future.
Why this effort to face issues that perhaps and from your current position are alien to you? Aren’t you afraid of being branded as arrogant for trying to speak for others?
But they are not other people’s business. The mistake is to think that the problems of others are alien to us. You can’t deny a problem you see and you can’t pretend you haven’t seen it either. The only way to improve this is for us all to get involved. When I feel bad is when there is something I can do something about and I don’t. Without wanting to compare myself with Lorca, but in 1936 he signed the manifesto in favor of the Popular Front. And he knew what he was doing. I knew he was playing it. He was not stupid or unconscious. He just did what he thinks he should do. Like Lorca, I believe that there are moments in life when it is impossible to be neutral, that indifference is criminal. I think I’ve been a bit pedantic.
The 15-M grew in the heat of the anti-eviction movement. Recently, the tenth anniversary of the movement that took over the squares was celebrated. What is your diagnosis of the current situation with part of that movement in power, in the Government of Spain?
On the one hand, there is the anti-eviction movement that has gone ahead. The movement is the same. Another thing is that it is not given the attention that we should, as I said before. The housing problem, on the other hand, is still there.
And more generally, in terms of the political situation?
What we live in Spain is not different from what is happening in the world globally. It happens in Italy, in Hungary, in Argentina, in the United States… We live in a moment in which the right-wing of politics means that opinions are not discussed, but facts. The very concept of truth is in question. And I think the media has a huge responsibility in what is happening. When the truth is irrelevant, it is democracy that is in danger. Far-right messages flourish and with them, authoritarian solutions. I am clear that anti-feminism, xenophobia or nationalism are alibis to defend the great economic powers of always. Without a doubt, you have to be there giving the battle.
And isn’t it sad that the Housing Law is still bogged down?
It is very disappointing that the legislature is over and we continue in the same. There is a poem by Lorca that says that under the multiplications there is a drop of blood. Beneath the numbers there are always realities of people, of human beings. That Housing Law can literally save the lives of tens of thousands of people and get them out of the inevitable cycle of poverty to which being homeless condemns you. It is imperative that this law be passed.
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