Antonio Gil (2013)

Antonio Gil was conceived as an aesthetic and ethical project. Our project uses the artifice of cinema -- the eye of the camera -- to attempt to capture an even more sophisticated and complex form of artifice: the myth. Far from being a heroic story or a rational explanation, this film is a polyphonic composition where the proper noun -- Antonio Gil -- is the signifier around which multiple and heterogenous stories come together. A mosaic of campesino voices, like a choir with its own peculiar cadence, narrates the myth's construction over the course of the 20th century, and accompanies us on a visual journey through its celebration. At the beginning of the film, we are situated in the year 2010, but as the film progresses, the images move us backwards in time: 2008, 2006, 2004, 2000. The iterations of its celebration can be seen as geological layers, which mix and build upon each other to consolidate the myth in the popular imagination. This film is also the narration of a ritual -- the annual festival in homage to the Gauchito Gil in the countryside of Corrientes, Argentina -- through the ritualization of a cinematic method: the traveling shot. The camera angle never changes; the locations remain the same -- and yet, everything appears to move and shift. Subtly, we witness the unintentional transformation of the colors, the setting, the faces, the characters, the fixtures. Generally, the further we move away in time, the closer we are to believing we've arrived at the truth, but in this film, this illusion quickly vanishes: like any myth, the Gauchito Gil is ever elusive. Using this narrative strategy, the film seeks to do justice to the singularity of the Gauchito Gil myth -- a narrative rooted in the imagination of a rural region of Guaraní ancestry, and long neglected within official Argentine culture. This story, which demands to be told, provides an origin for the myth, but without a doubt, goes beyond even the Gauchito Gil himself.