Since there was no pre-existing script, I used to send to the crew the night before each shooting day a text message with some sort of oblique working plan. Those notes and drawings that I shared over a few weeks accumulated and became the script for the film. However, the film was already finished by then. Alan Martín SEGAL

Key, washer, coin (2018), An interrupted investigation of R (2018), Vía Negativa (2022)

Critical City Explorer
Alan Martín Segal’s Vía Negativa revolves around a young man who befriends two anarchist squatters in a seemingly abandoned and unnamed Argentinean city. From a distance, he at first only observes their modus operandi to get into empty apartments or store fronts in abandoned commercial galleries, before they start involving him in their tactics.

The audio-visual approach is characterized by the complete interdependence of sound and image, always heightening or emphasizing our perception of the imagery in relation to the superb equivocal music by Ailín Grad and sound design by Manuel De Andrés. This soundscape in combination with the montage consisting out of static frames, specific focal points and close-ups of objects, gestures, and various acts, creates a forlorn atmosphere that transforms these empty spaces the characters enter, into places of uncertainty.

The film is loosely based on Ezequiel Martínez Estrada’s La Cabeza de Goliat (1940), written during the economic hardships of the 1930s. Estrada’s critical essay denounced Buenos Aires as a modern city and place of alienation, according to Segal “Providing a template for reckoning with every city founded by Europeans in the Americas,” while simultaneously expressing a fondness for the capital. In a way Vía Negativa is a reflection of this complicated duality, drawing on its dialectics as Segal presents Argentina both as an abandoned urban landscape caught in the past and reminiscent of European architecture, as well as a place of community, adaptation, and coming changes. This combination of sound, image, and architecture creates not only a feeling of uncertainty but also of vulnerability. Both are an ode, as well as critique, of Segal’s hometown. Sofie Cato MAAS

Production Filmy Wiktora(alanmartinsegal@gmail.com)

2022 Mar del Plata IFF Best Film (Altered States Competition, Nominee)