Lucía Puenzo, from Argentina to the rest of Latin America round trip

(By Victoria Ojam) The writer, filmmaker and screenwriter Lucía Puenzo, who will premiere tomorrow with a double final episode on the Lifetime cable signal the series “Señorita 89”, a thriller set in the late 80s in the Miss Mexico beauty pageant, assured that working in different parts of Latin America “creates a kind of school and forms a new identity” when it comes to telling stories.

It is that after directing films like “XXY” (2007), “El niño pez” (2009) and the acclaimed “Wakolda” (2013), Puenzo set foot in the television format and left our borders to take on other projects in the region, such as the Chilean production “La Jauría” -together with the brothers Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín- and the recent Mexican film “La caída”, with the main role by Karla Souza.

This year, and also from the North American country, the director presented “Miss 89” once again with the Larraín company, which had had a first step through streaming on Starzplay (currently Lionsgate+) and which at the beginning of the month reached an audience first expanded on cable by Lifetime.

Constantly watched in the isolated “La Encantada” farm, the participants of the 1989 litter go through traumatic moments, with disappearances and tragedies included, which lead them to unite and support each other to escape alive from the place.

“It is at the height of television in Mexico, everything that scandalizes us today was allowed, and that was the point of attack, realizing that in reality this was not just a story of entertainment from the world of beauty, but a political thriller of what was happening at that time,” Puenzo explained in dialogue with Télam about the strip, which already has a second season in preparation.

However, with an admitted desire to remain based in Argentina and to promote local production, last year she returned to Buenos Aires to shoot “Los impactados”, her next film, which will tell “the story of a survivor of a lightning strike who wakes up six months after an induced coma and is transformed into someone she doesn’t recognize.”

“It’s a bit of a David Cronenberg universe, a very strange thriller that circulates because of addiction to electricity, because of the idea that something that comes from heaven unexpectedly allows you to reconfigure yourself and invent that other person who is born after the impact,” he said. .

Facing the end of the first installment of the strip, which reached European screens with a good reception by audiences, Puenzo spoke with this agency about the theme of the series and its presence in the industry.

Télam: How much reality is there in the series, beyond the suspenseful elements of the narrative?

Lucía Puenzo: We met with former contestants and doctors who had been there and this thing happened that they were taken to farms, which were really leisure spaces for Mexican political power. They swapped girls after nights out, it was a totally irregular black hole. And we had the idea that a general culture teacher would narrate it, because that year that figure was included for the first time, but all the prejudices that it was told by a white and educated woman in a country like Mexico, which precisely what he did in those years, and continues to do today, is to make more than half of the population invisible, who are not light-eyed and blonde women. It was starting off on the wrong foot, because behind the young women there were stories of all kinds, in many cases dreams of entire families, who were generally from the middle class or lower middle class and gambled a lot.

T: What is it like to revisit that time and that world from fiction and 30 years later?

LP: Many of the things that are told, although they may not be so brutal, continue to happen. What happens in the media with young girls has changed a lot, but there is still a long way to go. I always remember when I was little and they still cut skirts in front of the screen of a family that watched that, normalized, everyone applauded and laughed at how a driver did that. It wasn’t that long ago really, although perhaps in the 80s it was even more appalling, because of everything that was happening in the sphere of power and in the media.

T: How do you think the way of representing these themes in film and television has changed over time?

LP: All the series I’ve worked on I wrote with the same group of authors, who are from different Latin American countries and are aware of the risks we have when we write series with female protagonists, because something that tended to happen is putting the characters of men in less interesting places, that are infantilized or fall into the stereotypes of evil, without the depth that it requires. For years I have been interested in what is happening with the youngest, in relation to all the conquests that have taken place in the universe of the fight for gender and sexual identity. When I made “XXY” there wasn’t even a gender identity law, it wasn’t even known what intersex was, many thought it was almost mythological. The same thing happens today with all the conquests of women on the street, but I think it’s interesting when we write series and movies about women to think carefully about what we’re writing.

T: It’s been a long time since you worked exclusively from Argentina, how did you take that step to the regional?

LP: While I produced my first films more with Europe, the last ones I made with Latin American producers, with networks of technical teams and casts that moved between countries, and we made films, and later series, thought regionally. More than anything it was learning certain different idiosyncrasies, because obviously they have very different political, racial and all kinds of issues from ours, and learning to write dialogue that they perceived as their own. That requires years of practice, even directing casts from other places, which also have their differences when it comes to acting records. There a kind of school is set up that mixes a lot of team leaders from different places in Latin America and that forms a new identity.

T: Anyway, you were able to come back for “The Impacted”. How was facing that project?

LP: I’m finishing editing it now, and it was a reunion with my technical team of a lifetime. Mariana de Girolamo stars, a Chilean actress who is the protagonist of “La Jauría”, because that is happening, that we form Latin American families, although it is a 100% Argentine story, written by Argentines and filmed here. We filmed the film with absolute freedom, we don’t even have producers or platforms behind it, it’s completely independent, and it was very good to film again here and in that way.