Home for a few days. For the last few months, I had been touring with Parabellum to Rotterdam, New York, Jeonju, where we took home the jury award and, in between, attended local screenings. I was in Salzburg, surrounded by impressive mountains that line the valley, trying to calm down when the mail dropped that afternoon. 

 

It's from the JEONJU IFF—an invitation to apply to the JEONJU Cinema Project, to be more precise, which previous editions were filled with prominent participants and filmmakers I deeply admired. This took me by surprise. The mail contained a request to send a proposal, an idea for a film to be made as soon as possible because time was of the essence to the JEONJU Cinema Project. The films have to be ready for the upcoming edition. 

 

I was always deeply inspired by the spirit and courage this slate proposes: rethinking the production models of contemporary cinema to open the possibility of a free and spontaneous way to make and think about film. Cinema as a tour de force.

 

And indeed, there was something I started working on, or more precisely, a place I wanted to distill a film out of: an ominous nudist sex club in Buenos Aires, curiously bordering a gathered community.

 

I replied and asked for a few days. I got to work, not so much because I thought it was feasible but electrified by invitation. When I sent the materials, I was content with what ended up being a rough sketch of a film, a raw political proposal—impossible to do in such a time frame, but great to develop with time and enough funds to do things right. That night I fell asleep soundly. Impossible, I reckoned, to be selected, but this became the new film I started working on. 

 

A few days later, I woke up to the response; the project was approved. The completed film must be done by the upcoming edition. In a panic, I stared at the pages that vaguely defined a story circling about a young woman inserting herself into this mysterious world I wanted to depict. What followed were feverish months of work. I assembled a team, and while part of my collaborators was writing with me on the script, others would start the casting process of figures we would write the night before. In the meantime, our line producer would call in to find out where we would send him next on his quest to fulfill our wildest ideas. As the summer in Buenos Aires hit peak temperatures, we slowly started to groove in syntony, inserted ourselves in the luscious wild landscape, surrounded by naked bodies, pushing towards our deadline, pushing towards Jeonju.  Lukas VALENTA RINNER

Parabellum (2015), A Decent Woman (2016)

On the Border of Isolation and Involvement 
What happens when you throw a posh gated community and a nudist colony into each other’s unlikely orbit? The outcome is a droll and cinematically intriguing comment on class, borders, isolation, and desire.

 

A Decent Woman, directed by Lukas Valenta Rinner, is set on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The Austrian auteur trains his bifurcated gaze on an enclave of secluded wealth, whose geometrically outlined landscape of golf courses, tennis courts, and manicured lawns contrast starkly with the voluptuously overgrown foliage that entwines the grove and patio of the nudist camp next door. While the residents on one side fret over junior tennis tournaments or arrange their tea sets in immaculate order, their neighbors lounge around the pool like pale iguanas, practicing tantric sex and soaking in pseudo-ecological dharmas.

 

Into this strange topography comes Belén (Iride Mockert), a domestic worker as sparing with words as with her smiles. Mockert, who has a dance background, interacts with her contrasting environments with the subtlest calibration of body language. She masters household drudgery with an impassivity comparable to Jeanne Dielman—even her affair with a security guard feels like a chore. But when she’s suddenly sighted at the nudist camp, we sense a tantalizing energy amidst the sea of indolent naked bodies.

 

Critics have cited Lucretia Martel and Yorgos Lanthimos as the Argentina-based Rinner’s influences in his deadpan study of bourgeois egotism, but he also shares a stylistic and thematic kinship with his compatriot Ulrich Seidl, as both uncover unsettling dimensions of mundane existence, from unconventional bodies to unpredictable desires. Like Seidl, Rinner neither judges nor takes sides.

 

Like his debut Parabellum, A Decent Woman is shot with technical precision. But this film also shimmers with mystery and sensuality, while thrumming with underlying tension—simmering between Belen’s employer Diana and her son, and latent in the nudists who paint themselves to impersonate wild animals. And when Diana barges into Belen’s room at night to ask for companionship, her entitled invasion of space foreshadows the fatal collapse of boundaries in the electrifying finale. Maggie LEE

 

Production Filmgarten, Nabis Filmgroup
Distribution Filmgarten, Grandfilm, Santa Cine, Hoanzl
International Sales FiGa Films (contact@figafilms.com)

2016 Torino FF Special Jury Prize (Winner)

2016 Thessaloniki IFF Golden Alexander (Nominee)

2016 Stockholm IFF Bronze Horse (Nominee)

2016 Sarajevo FF Heart of Sarajevo (Nominee)

2016 Mar del Plata IFF Best Argentinian Director·SAGAI Best Argentine Breakthrough Performance Actor (Winner), Best Argentinean Film (Nominee)

2017 Diagonale Grand Prize (Best Feature Film)·Diagonale Award (Best Sound Design) (Winner)

2017 Cartagena Film Festival Golden India Catalina (Nominee)

2017 Viennale Vienna Film Award (Winner)

2018 Argentinean Film Critics Association Awards Silver Condor (Nominee)