What begins as a seemingly straightforward documentary commission about Rubén Santantonín, a largely forgotten figure of Argentina’s avant-garde, gradually turns into a much more elusive investigation. Working with conceptual artist David Lamelas, a former collaborator of Santantonín, the filmmakers in El Fantasma (The Phantom) discover that reconstructing the life of an artist who deliberately erased much of his own legacy is also an act of interpretation — and perhaps invention. Blending documentary, fiction and archival material, the film questions who has the right to tell an artist’s story, what remains when an artist disappears, and whether cinema can ever recover a life without rewriting it in the process.

At the center of this unusual project are filmmakers Ignacio Masllorens and David Lamelas, with Laura Citarella producing the film as part of the Argentine collective El Pampero Cine, known for developing an intensely collaborative and independent way of making films. In Venice, we spoke about Santantonín and Lamelas, the discovery of previously unseen archival material, the decision to turn the filmmaking process itself into part of the story, and why working collectively remains at the heart of their cinema.

NS: My first question is for Laura. You also have projects connected with art and literature, and you are so deeply involved in cinema. Why did you choose this project? And what is your place in contemporary Argentine cinema?

LC: I don’t know if I can give you an answer to that. I’m not sure.

IM: She’s one of the best female directors in the history of Argentine cinema. I can say that because I’m not a part of it — but that’s true.

LC: I think it has a little bit to do with what we were talking about yesterday in relation to Ignacio’s film. I think we finally found a way to work almost like a factory with El Pampero Cine. We are constantly producing, constantly building cinematography, constantly in movement.

It doesn’t have so much to do with me or with the place I have in Argentine cinema, but with this group. And it’s not only the three other partners — Mariana, Agustín Mendilaharzu and Alejo Moguillansky — but also Ignacio, Ezequiel, my husband, the actresses and actors around us. It’s a big family, a community. I think this community has worked very hard for almost 25 years to establish a place for itself. I don’t know exactly what that place is. It could be like an island because it’s a very precise project, with a very precise way of producing and making films. But I cannot speak about myself without mentioning this idea of the group.

It also has to do with what we were talking about yesterday regarding Ignacio’s film and the 1960s, when artists worked together in groups, almost like families. So, yes, I think it’s about community.

IM: We share the same way of making movies, the same idea of how to produce a movie, and the same rejection of conventional industry filmmaking. We share the same feeling about it, so we grew up making films in a different way.

LC: And it’s not necessarily because we reject the industry. I think it has more to do with the fact that we found a way of making films with our own hands, in a more iconoclastic, handcrafted way — like artisans working with their own hands. We found this way of making films, and I think it gave us the opportunity to keep making them all the time rather than producing them in the traditional way, where maybe you have to wait five years to get the money.

IM: Then you write the script first and shoot the whole movie in six weeks, and that’s it. And then maybe you can reshoot. We don’t work like that. Our films and projects are sometimes much longer processes. We do everything. We change roles all the time. We direct, we edit, we write, we act sometimes. And all the people around us are like us. All our friends work in the same way.

NS: My next question is for Ignacio. I googled all the people from the film, like the main characters did in the beginning of the film, and realized that they are real people — Ruben Santantonín and David Lamelas (and of course – David is your co-director!)… Why did you want to make a film about these people? What was the original idea?

IM: The idea of making a movie about Rubén Santantonín came from an institution called Isla, a foundation devoted to Latin American art that has an archive of several artists. They wanted El Pampero to make something about Rubén because he is not very well known. He is a rather forgotten artist. My friends at El Pampero invited me to do the project. They also asked if we wanted to work with David Lamelas, because he knew Rubén when he was a young artist and had worked with him. Rubén was like a mentor to him.

So we said, yes, let’s do it with David. Let’s invite him to participate in the project. But we didn’t want to make a standard, conventional documentary. We wanted to do something else — a hybrid of fiction and documentary. We decided to use the beginning of the real project as material for the fiction. So in the film you see a woman who has an art collection and asks these producers to make a film about Rubén. She also asks them to work with David Lamelas. That’s exactly what happened to us in reality. So the film is like a mirror of what actually happened.

NS: And I find it funny how you portray these young women who are the producers. They always have these poker faces. They almost seem like they aren’t very professional.

IM: They want to be successful producers who are just starting a small production company. They’re very ambitious, but they’re also funny and lovely in a way. Agustín Mendilaharzu, Laura’s partner at El Pampero and also the person who wrote the script for the film, and I thought: let’s create these two girls. We liked the idea of having not one producer, but two — almost like Siamese twins. We loved the idea of two people who are always together and talk almost as if they were one person. I don’t know exactly why, but we started with that idea. We created two young producers who need to work with David as an obligation in order to get the money for the project. And the rest of the crew — the real crew that made the movie, including the woman who operates the camera and the person who records the sound — also act in the film. So we created a crew for the documentary and then started filming them. They work on the movie as technicians, but also as actors. That’s very strange because they didn’t know, when they started, that they were going to appear in the film.

LC: I think it also has to do with the fact that Ignacio has been working alone on many of his films. So now he assumes this other camera—a camera watching the person in charge of the camera. You could do that because you had the tools.

IM: When we asked them to work on the movie — the woman who operates the camera, Leo, who records the sound, and Flor, who produces — I also saw them as potential characters. I cast them because I always wanted David to be surrounded by these young people.

NS: It’s very interesting because the film is not only experimental in its form; the filmmaking process itself becomes experimental. And at the heart of the story there is David —

IM: — like the U.S. ambassador.

NS: He didn’t come to Venice…

IM: No. At the beginning of this year, David had a trip to New York and had several health problems. He can’t walk very well, and long plane journeys are very difficult for him. You need to travel with a companion, ideally in first or business class, so it’s very complicated for him. He decided not to come.

LC: And Venice isn’t easy either. If you want to come from Argentina, you have to go by car to the airport, then take a flight, make a connection, take another flight, then a car and then a boat.

NS: But in the film he looks great. And he’s 80!

IM: Yes, but the film was shot several years ago. We started shooting at the beginning of 2024.

LC: He was already a little fragile, and doing everything necessary to get to Venice would have been difficult for him. So he preferred not to come. It’s sad because—

IM: Did you know that he was the youngest Argentine artist to participate in the Venice Biennale in 1968? I wanted to mention that because we knew we were coming to Venice, so we changed that part just to say it.

NS: And I want to ask about the costumes. David’s clothes, especially, are beautiful and very artistic — his hats and his shirts.

LC: That’s how he dressed every day. It was amazing.

IM: We didn’t have a costume designer. David came with his own clothes. There was no need to create costumes for him because he was already in charge of his own look. The only costumes we almost designed were for the two producers. But even then, they used their own clothes. We just helped them with some more formal outfits, and that was it.

NS: You mentioned that you work as a group, and the film also portrays two groups — one younger and one older generation of artists. Is working collectively common in Argentine art and cinema?

LC: I think there’s a strong energy around working collectively. For example, not only in cinema but also in Buenos Aires — and in other cities and provinces — there are many groups of theatre people who come together to create their own spaces. They write, direct and act in those spaces. So I think there’s an energy around the idea of making things as a group. In cinema, it’s always more difficult because you have the industry. Cinema is very collective, but it’s organized in a very vertical way.

El Pampero is one of these groups. Then you have, for example, people in the province of Córdoba. There’s a film at Giornate degli Autori now by María Aparicio, and she’s part of a group that has been working together for many years in a way very similar to ours. One person directs one film and another produces it, and in the next film they change roles. This is something that is happening in various places. In Entre Ríos and Santa Fe, for example, there are filmmakers like Maximiliano Schonfeld and Eduardo Crespo. I think that over the last few years this idea of working as a group has become contagious. It has been almost like a virus, because you start looking at other disciplines, like music and theatre, where people work collectively. And in Argentina you have many economic problems. Today it’s even worse because of the government and its ideas about cinema and culture.

So I think people also choose this way of producing because it’s a way of making films possible. We enjoy working this way. It’s not that we do it simply because we don’t have money. I think these ideas about filmmaking were born from the realization that if you have to wait for traditional funding and a traditional production structure, you might not make a film for ten years. Our idea is to keep making films all the time, to keep training ourselves, and to keep becoming better filmmakers.

NS: I think making movies is a collective art. If you look at the early countercultural movements and all the New Waves, they were often groups of young people working together.

IM: We are not so young anymore, but we started that way. When you study cinema, you see these movements — the New English Cinema, the French New Wave, the Nouvelle Vague, the New Argentine Cinema of the 1960s. They all had the same mentality: friends working together, almost like an underground movement outside mainstream cinema.

NS: The group from the 1960s reminds me of the editorial office of Cahiers du cinéma. It has this feeling of freedom, of something new, of change.

IM: Exactly. When you study cinema, you see those movements and think, “I want to do that.” Friends working together, having fun and making movies — that’s what it’s all about.

NS: One of the main questions of the film is an ethical one. Is it possible to recreate the performance of burning art? And is it ethical to burn your own work?

IM: If you want to do it, you can. Of course, it’s not necessarily a nice thing, but if you’ve made something and you want to destroy it, you can.

LC: I don’t know if the film gives an answer to that. At the beginning, you think he burned his work because he wanted to disappear from the world. That’s how he was understood for many years. But by the end, the film opens up another possibility: that burning the work could itself have been part of the work, almost like a performance. The film doesn’t close the question by saying, “This is what happened.” Instead, it offers another way of thinking about Santantonín.

Suddenly, he appears as a much more vital and alive person. Maybe he burned everything because he was doing something else with those works, something connected to life rather than depression or disappearance.

IM: Many artists have burned their work for practical reasons. Marta Minujín, for example, burned some of her work when she needed to return to Argentina from Paris. Others have done similar things. Rubén was going to move to Venezuela, so he also had a reason to burn his work. But I like to think that before doing it, he photographed everything — the works and the fire itself — and kept those images with the hope that someone in the future would rediscover them and perhaps make a movie about them. In a way, he left all of that for us.

LC: It’s incredible because it reminds me of Borges. You didn’t see the film about Borges, unfortunately, but it has a similar idea: artists leave things behind for someone else to pick up, reread and reinterpret. What’s strange is that these two people are so different. Borges is one of the most important writers in the history of literature, while almost nobody knows Santantonín. That’s incredible. I think the way Santantonín was understood over the years became almost a kind of marketing narrative. It was easier for academics to say: he was a dark person, he died young, perhaps he committed suicide, he was depressed, he burned his work.

IM: It’s easy for academics to put him in that place.

LC: Yes. You can sell more stories if you construct a figure like that, rather than saying he was a happy person who suddenly died and happened to burn his work. The film doesn’t confirm that he burned his work for another reason, but perhaps he did it because he was trying something connected to life rather than depression. For me, that’s one of the most interesting things in the film.

NS: How did you find out about the slides? Was it a well-known fact that he had left these images behind?

IM: No, it wasn’t a secret, but it was something almost nobody knew about. We learned about the slides from Isla. They told us that, among the archival materials they had, there were some color slides showing photographs of Santantonín’s works. They said, “There’s also this.” And then Tomás told us there was a photograph of the burning itself. I immediately thought that was very interesting. From the very first moment we heard about it, we knew we wanted to use it as a climax in the film. It revealed something new, because almost nobody knew about it.

NS: Laura, you also appear in Life of Jorge Luis Borges. How was it for you to become part of the filmmaking process on screen?

LC: I’m mainly the producer of both films. That’s why I’m so tired! I’m the producer of all the films at El Pampero. Every film made there involves me, even the ones I direct myself. Of course, we think together because we’re a group and we like to work this way, but the everyday organizational work is my responsibility.

I appeared in Life of Jorge Luis Borges because, for example, we had to film all the objects and archival materials. Just as we did with Santantonín, we went to document the Borges archive. I was responsible for one of the cameras and also for the sound. It’s simply how we work. For example, Mariano shot some scenes in Geneva and other places himself. He went with the camera alone and did the shooting on his own. We usually don’t have the budget to take the whole crew everywhere, but we also don’t need to. We prefer not to move around as a complete crew. If Mariano is in France and thinks, “I’m going to Geneva to shoot some of the Borges locations,” he just takes a camera and goes. That’s our way of producing. We all do everything to some extent. Of course, there are specific roles: the director ultimately makes the artistic decisions, while the producer is constantly dealing with financing and organization. But we all participate in different parts of the process.

NS: It seems to me that your group has also helped bring art and literature to a wider audience through your films. You discover these hidden gems and treasures of world culture. Is popularizing them part of your goal, or is it simply a way of making your own art?

IM: I think it’s the second. The starting point of my film was Santantonín and his archive, but I didn’t want to make a film simply about him. That’s more like an excuse for making a film about something else. It’s also a film about David Lamelas. We knew we were making a film about him and about his life because he’s alive and present in the movie. He’s not just represented through photographs; he’s a person who experiences things on screen. But the film is also about getting older, the passage of time, age, and the relationship between young and older people. Ultimately, it’s a film about time.

LC: Most of the films we make are about many things at the same time. And we’re constantly trying to find new ways of bringing those things into cinema. Sometimes the way we deal with the material is more important than the subject itself. There is this idea that storytelling or certain ‘big subjects’ are what matter at festivals, and that you have to make a statement about a particular issue. We’re more interested in exploring and inventing cinematic languages. That’s what we’re constantly trying to do.

At the same time, you can talk about David Lamelas’s life, Santantonín, Borges, the directors’ own lives and even the way we work. If you watch El Fantasma, for example, you can see how we work. The film itself describes a way of producing.

IM: We also like finding new ways of telling stories.

LC: New forms of cinema.

IM: Exactly.