Argentinian-Swiss writer and director Milagros Mumenthaler is preparing a new project that marks a notable change in his filmography. This will be the first work to feature a young male protagonist.
Speaking to Variety on the afternoon of Thursday, June 11, after a masterclass at the ECAM Forum in Madrid, Mumenthaler said that the film is still in its very early stages and there is no working title. “This is the only thing I call this work a ‘romantic drama’ right now,” she said, explaining that it is a drama with love story elements.
“I envisioned the character as a young man,” Mumenthaler added. “There were things I still felt I owed to my younger self, and it had more to do with love stories.”
Asked whether the project would again be structured as a Swiss-Argentine piece, as is often the case with her work, Mumenthaler said that was still undecided. “Maybe we’ll add another country,” she said. “People always want to do that, but it doesn’t always happen. I’m just getting started.”
The comments followed a public masterclass in which Momentaire discussed how films are constructed from images, locations, objects, sounds and the physical state of characters.
The session was part of a retrospective featuring her latest novel, The Currents, her 2016 second novel, The Idea of a Lake, and her Locarno Golden Leopard Award-winning debut, Back to Stay.
start with an image
“For me, the first thing I do when I start a film is capture a feeling or state of mind,” Mumenthaler said. “Typically, that comes through through imagery.”
This approach was already on display in her 2011 debut film, Back to Stay, about three sisters living at home after the death of their grandmother. The film won the Golden Leopard directed by Locarno, the Best Actress Award for Maria Canale, and the Fipressi Award.
In Madrid, director Mumenthaler explained how the house was central to the film’s design. “Home is home,” she said, stressing that she didn’t want the single location setting to feel claustrophobic. The outside world was maintained through the use of windows, weather changes, clothes hanging outside, and the sisters’ movements in and out of the room.
Her main idea was to treat the camera as a link to her absent grandmother. “I thought the camera would become a kind of absent presence,” Mumenthaler said. This decision shaped the film’s long takes, group composition, and slow movement through the room.
The objects also contained family history: dresses, stored items, and a corset that once belonged to her grandmother. “There was something about the history that objects could have,” she said, describing them as traces of the past still active in the present.
Memory, formats and materials
Her second novel, The Idea of a Lake, is freely adapted from Guadalupe Gaona’s autobiographical photo and poetry book Pozo de Aire, moving from the family home to political and personal memories. The film depicts a pregnant woman dealing with the disappearance of her father during the Argentine dictatorship.
Mumenthaler said she feels responsible for the material because it stems from real pain. She based her work on Gaona’s books, family photos, conversations with the author, and trips to her home in southern Argentina, where the original text was based.
For this film, she tested Super 8, 16mm, 35mm, and HD before choosing Super 16. “The work was so beautiful,” she said. “You can use the same image in each format and get something completely different,” she adds, “I love 35mm. For me, it’s the definitive film.”
“The Idea of the Lake” also clarified a question that runs through Mumenthaler’s work: how to show thought and memory without explaining too much. “How can intimate thoughts and intimate states of mind be expressed through images and sounds?” she asked.
“The Currents”: Inside Lina’s Crisis
That question became more direct in her third feature film, “The Currents.” The film had its world premiere in Toronto, was screened in San Sebastian, and won the RTVE Otra Mirada Award. Distributed internationally by Luxbox and released in arthouses in the United States 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 reviewed The Current in Variety magazine, calling the film an “elegant portrait of the elusive Argentine” and highlighting its “meticulously silky formal structure”.
Mumenthal said the film was built on Lina’s perceptions. “Everything you see in this film has to do with seeing it through her,” she said. That meant shaping sounds, wind, water, street noises, and gestures from within the character’s crisis, including early metallic sounds that “relate to something only she perceives.”
Several passages in The Currents follow the women Lina meets in Buenos Aires, a moment Mumenthal describes as an “escape of thought” reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.”
The color was also tied to Lina’s condition. Mumenthaler imagined Buenos Aires as an old gray city, and Lina made it stand out with stronger colors. “It wasn’t very naturalistic,” she says. “For me, it was a reaction to fiction.”
Asked about her next project after the masterclass, Mumenthaler once again described the process as instinctual. “I usually start a project in a very sincere way,” she said. “This character (the young male protagonist) came to mind and I wanted to do something with him.”
