This past Saturday, as part of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, director, and screenwriter Celina Murga, along with the cast of the film, including Joaquín Furriel and Marina de Tavira, presented their movie and attended a reception with Scorsese, who is the executive producer.
El contexto
Seeing Martin Scorsese present an Argentine film in the city he lives in and loves, New York has a special flavor for those who follow him from afar, being Latin American. Such an achievement is not given lightly, especially for a filmmaker. But Celina Murga, with her successful career, has managed to have the support of an experienced director from the beginning. The filmmaker met Scorsese thanks to a Rolex mentorship for filmmakers, and they continued their path of working together until today, where he becomes the executive producer of "The Scent of Freshly Cut Grass."
The film is part of the program lineup of this Tribeca Film Festival and received a very good reception from the audience. The narrative, written by the director herself along with Lucía Osorio and Juan Villegas, explores, through a parallel story, the crisis of Pablo (Furriel) and Natalia (Tavira), who are both unfaithful in their marriages but share a workplace at the University in the Faculty of Agronomy.
This allows the journey of both protagonists to be traversed in parallel, and, subtly and disguised in everyday life, all the differences that are ingrained and naturalized in society begin to be revealed through the treatment given to Natalia for being a woman versus what Pablo experiences in a patriarchal society.
One of the great virtues of the film is that it is a profound but not forced reflection on the invisibility of these themes and how they are experienced from different perspectives depending on gender. We discussed this with its director and screenwriter, who also had space to talk about what is happening in her country regarding budget cuts and the vulnerability to which Argentine cinema is exposed today.
In this context, a photo with an Argentine flag in support of its cinema outside the consulate of that country in New York becomes symbolic, and having director Martin Scorsese there to support them is an unparalleled gesture for the filmmaker, who only has words of gratitude for the generosity of the acclaimed director.
We spoke with Celina Murga and Joaquín Furriel, who told us how they experienced the event and what the key points of the film were. You can watch the full interview here: