At ECAM Forum, the Argentine-Swiss director reflected on how houses, bodies, sound and color shape her films
Argentine-Swiss writer-director Milagros Mumenthaler is preparing a new project that will mark a notable shift in her filmography: for the first time, it will center on a young male protagonist.
Speaking to Variety on Thursday afternoon, June 11, after her ECAM Forum masterclass in Madrid, Mumenthaler said the film is still at a very early stage and has no working title. “The only thing I’m calling it now is ‘rom-drama,’” she said, describing it as a drama with a love-story element.
“I imagined a young male character,” Mumenthaler added. “There was something I felt I still owed to my younger self, something more connected to a love story.”
Asked whether the project would again be structured as a Switzerland-Argentina production, as has often been the case in her work, Mumenthaler said that remains open. “Maybe we’ll add another country,” she said. “One always wants to, but it doesn’t always happen. I’m just starting.”
The comments followed a public masterclass in which Mumenthaler discussed how she builds films from images, locations, objects, sound and the physical state of her characters.
The session formed part of a retrospective taking in her latest feature, “The Currents,” her 2016 second film “The Idea of a Lake,” and her Locarno Golden Leopard-winning debut “Back to Stay.”
“For me, the first thing that happens when I start a film is to capture a sensation or a state of mind,” Mumenthaler said. “In general, it comes through an image.”
That method could already be seen in “Back to Stay,” her 2011 debut about three sisters living in the family house after the death of the grandmother who raised them. The film won Locarno’s Golden Leopard, best actress for María Canale and the Fipresci prize.
In Madrid, Mumenthaler explained how central that house was to the film’s design. “The house is home,” she said, stressing that she did not want the single-location setting to feel claustrophobic. Windows, changes in weather, clothes hanging outside and the movement of the sisters in and out of rooms were used to keep the outside world present.
Her main idea was to treat the camera as linked to the absent grandmother. “I thought the camera could be like a presence of the absent being,” Mumenthaler said. That decision shaped the film’s long takes, group framings and slow movements through the rooms.
Objects also carried family history: dresses, stored belongings, a corset that once belonged to the grandmother. “There was something about the history that objects can have,” she said, describing them as traces of the past still active in the present.
Her second feature, “The Idea of a Lake,” adapted freely from Guadalupe Gaona’s autobiographical book of photographs and poems “Pozo de aire,” moved from the family house to political and personal memory. The film follows a pregnant woman confronting the disappearance of her father during Argentina’s dictatorship.
Mumenthaler said she felt a responsibility toward the material because it came from real pain. She worked from Gaona’s book, family photographs, conversations with the author and trips to the house in southern Argentina that shaped the original text.
For the film, she tested Super 8, 16mm, 35mm and HD before choosing Super 16. “It was very beautiful to do that work,” she said. “The same image in each format gives back something very different.” She added: “I’m in love with 35mm. For me, it is the definitive format of cinema.”
“The Idea of a Lake” also sharpened a question that runs through Mumenthaler’s work: how to show thought and memory without explaining too much. “How can intimate thought, or an intimate state of mind, be represented through images and sounds?” she asked.
That question becomes more direct in “The Currents,” her third feature, which world premiered at Toronto and went on to San Sebastián, where it won the RTVE Otra Mirada Award. Sold internationally by Luxbox and released in U.S. arthouses by Kino Lorber, the film stars Isabel Aimé González Sola as Lina, a woman who throws herself into the freezing waters of Geneva and then returns to Buenos Aires as if nothing had happened.
Guy Lodge, reviewing “The Currents” for Variety, called the film an “elegant, elusive Argentine character study” and highlighted its “meticulous, silkily textured formal construction.”
Mumenthaler said the film was built around Lina’s perception. “Everything that is seen in the film has to do with seeing it through her,” she said. That meant shaping sound, wind, water, city noise and gestures from inside the character’s crisis, including an early metallic noise that “had to do with something only she is perceiving.”
Several passages in “The Currents” follow women Lina sees in Buenos Aires, moments Mumenthaler described as “flights of thought,” connected to Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.”
Color, too, was tied to Lina’s condition: Mumenthaler imagined Buenos Aires as an old, grey city, with Lina standing out through stronger colors. “It was not so much naturalism,” she said. “For me, it responded to fiction.”
Asked about her next project after the masterclass, Mumenthaler again described the process as instinctive. “I usually begin projects in a very genuine way,” she said. “This character [the young male protagonist] came into my head, and I wanted to do something with him.”
