“A highly artistic first film that pushes cinematic boundaries and puts its directors on the map.”
Playing in this year’s Berlinale Perspectives is The River Train, the debut feature from directors Lorenzo Ferro and Lucas A. Vignale. The Perspectives section, newly established in 2025 to spotlight first features, is already shaping itself as one of the festival’s most exciting spaces for discovery, and Ferro and Vignale’s film arrives as an immediate standout. With The River Train, the directors tell a coming-of-age story rooted in Argentine rural life, and in doing so they announce themselves as striking new voices in both Argentine and world cinema.
The film centers on Milo, a nine-year-old boy played with remarkable depth by Milo Barría. Milo lives in the Argentine countryside with his parents and sister, and his life is structured around discipline and performance. His father trains him in Malambo, a traditional Argentine gaucho folk dance, and pushes him to improve and to perfect each step. The father’s mantra, “speak, don’t think” becomes both an instruction and a weight. Milo clearly loves his father and wants to be the best son he can be, but the training begins to feel relentless. Even in his bedroom at night, Milo is forced to train.
One day, while watching television, Milo sees an interview with an older student who announces with confidence, “I’m going to Buenos Aires to work as an artist.” That single sentence lands like a revelation. For Milo, the city becomes a new possibility. It’s not just Buenos Aires as a place, but Buenos Aires as freedom and as an escape from a life already shaped for him. That night, Milo dreams of leaving for the city, only to seem to wake back up in his home. It’s never clear, however, whether the rest of the film is a dream, or if the dream was only for a moment. Ferro and Vignale constantly blur the boundary between what is happening and what is imagined, allowing magical realism to seep into the texture of everyday life.
Milo is only nine, and the enormity of what he wants quickly becomes apparent. How does a child leave home without being noticed? How does he pay for a train ticket? How does he survive alone in a city he only knows through what he has seen on television or from what he has heard? These questions linger throughout the film, not as just logistical puzzles but as emotional ones. How does a child at such a young age succeed without the assistance and help of others? Are all dreams achievable or sustainable?
To escape unnoticed, Milo mixes sleeping powder into his parents’ and sister’s food. From here, the film leans fully into its dreamlike logic. Milo plays soccer with a man dressed like Jesus, complete with a crown of thorns. He boards a light-blue train that glides across the countryside as if untethered from its tracks. There is only one train, moving forward, with no track to its side, as if there is only one way forward. On the train, a bird is released from its cage and a toy monkey beats its tiny cymbals. These images feel symbolic without becoming heavy-handed. Milo wants freedom, wants movement, and wants to escape the constraints of home, and yet Ferro and Vignale quietly suggest that escape itself may be another kind of illusion.
During this train sequence the title drop occurs midway and strikes a complete tonal shift. It initially unfolds in black and white, only to bloom suddenly into color when the title appears. The countryside erupts into lush greens and radiant blues, as if the film itself is reminding Milo of what he is leaving behind. The beauty of the land may be sentimentalized, but it is also honored. The directors seem aware that the dream of the city often requires forgetting the place one comes from.
When Milo arrives in Buenos Aires, Ferro and Vignale shift more to the use of magical realism. The city is populated by figures who feel slightly heightened, slightly theatrical, noting Fellini’s influence. Milo auditions for a performance role and is chosen over other boys. Overseeing the audition is The Professor, played by Rita Pauls, who wears a striking, colorful dress adorned with flowers. Later on, Milo follows her home and sneaks inside. He dons a wrestler’s mask, and he tries on her dress. In these moments his identity becomes less clear. The city allows him to experiment with who he is, but also shows how he feels lost being alone and so far from home.
When The Professor tells him that masks are something “we wear when we want to be invisible,” the line seems at first a bit perplexing. Milo doesn’t want to be invisible, yet has been treated as invisible during his time in Buenos Aires. He’s trying to succeed in a world that is too large, too fast, and too indifferent for a child. For all the exhilaration of escape, the city leaves him profoundly alone. He misses his parents. He misses home where he had a community. The dream of Buenos Aires, once so luminous, begins to fracture.
The River Train is about the divide between not just rural and city life in Argentina, but worldwide. It’s about the long-held belief that opportunity lives elsewhere and that self-fulfillment requires departure. Leaving means severing oneself from family, language, routine, and safety. However, Ferro and Vignale do not dismiss the importance of the move to the city. As seen with the scenes of Milo’s mask and dress wearing, they acknowledge the importance for people to move to the cities when they may not be respected, wanted, or may be shunned by society.
Ferro and Vignale handle this tension with amazing skill and grace for first-time directors. Their film is gentle but not simplistic. You can feel Truffaut in the attention to childhood, and Fellini in the heightened theatricality of the city encounters, yet The River Train never feels derivative. Much of the film rests on this longing to become someone else without knowing what that will cost. Milo wants change, but he also wants the love and safety of home. The directors understand that these desires often coexist and that growing up means learning they cannot always be reconciled.
As a debut, The River Train is impressive. Ferro and Vignale don’t shout the film’s ambitions; they let them drift into view, like the train itself, moving steadily through fields and memory. In the context of Berlinale’s first Perspectives lineup, The River Train feels like the kind of discovery the section was made for – a highly artistic first film that pushes cinematic boundaries and puts its directors on the map.
(c) Image copyright – Cinco Rayos