THE EXCHANGE

What deeply drew me to Sergio Schoklender’s story was that the escape itself involved a mise-en-scène. After committing a crime, he decided to disguise himself, enter a bar, and literally perform a scene of confession. From that point on, his time on the run almost becomes a Western: he is caught, beaten, manages to escape, and ends up sleeping beside a stream, like a gaucho from the early twentieth century. I couldn’t stop thinking that, by entering that bar, Schoklender had turned it into a film set. What fascinated me about the escape was that the act of mise-en-scène worked as a kind of refuge, as a mechanism for enduring and processing what had happened. Faced with a reality that becomes incomprehensible, fiction emerges as a possible way of inhabiting it. During my research, I began to realize that almost nothing remains of that event except two things: the landscape and the story. The landscape is still there; it is the same place Sergio passed through. And the story, which over time has accumulated versions, details, and imaginings, continues to circulate in our memory. I was interested in constructing the film from the tension between these two elements, without resorting to a conventional representation of the event. Rather than reconstructing a crime, I wanted to approach the forces surrounding it: fear, uncertainty, drift. I sought to create an unstable space where something is invented and, in the same gesture, comes undone: a territory of friction between what we see, imagine, and hear. I am particularly interested in the ghostly dimension of things, in what remains outside the frame, in what we cannot see but nevertheless feel is there. For me, the empty frame has a particular force because it opens up a space in which to imagine what we cannot see. I think of imagination not as something opposed to reality, but as a living force capable of altering it, of changing what we believe to be fixed. Perhaps reality is nothing more than a fiction that has become consolidated over time, and storytelling a way of making it unstable.

Screenwriter and film director. She graduated in Film Directing from Universidad del Cine and participated in the Film Program at the Art Department of Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. In 2023, she was selected for Berlinale Talents as a screenwriter and director. The script for her feature debut, Próxima Aparición (Cimarrón Cine), was selected for the Berlinale Script Station in 2023 and the Berlinale Co-Production Market in 2024. The project received a special mention for its screenplay at Fundación PROA’s Premio Estímulo a la Escritura in 2022 and won the INCAA Completed Screenplay Competition in 2024. She works as a screenwriter for production companies including Piano (Mexico), Schuldenbergfilms (Germany), and Cimarrón (Uruguay). She is currently co-writing Fausto, directed by Jazmín López, selected for CineMart at IFFR 2025. She has written and directed several short films, including De verdad quiero verte pero llevará mucho tiempo, Quisiera llegar pronto, El fuego nace en el agua, La mujer que usaba esparcidas las ondas del pelo, Algo se aproxima, and Amalia, which have been selected for national and international festivals including Mar del Plata, BAFICI, Black Canvas, Huesca, Valdivia, Shnit, Milano, and Kinoforum São Paulo. Since 2023, she has been the Artistic Director of Syncro, International Short Film Festival of Buenos Aires.