Puan, the film that recovers an iconic institution and the attacks against public education

(By Ana Clara Pérez Cotten) With one of those dynamics of correlations and approaches that only fiction can bring to reality, “Puan”, the film written and directed by Benjamín Naishtat and María Alché, reaches the country’s theaters in full debate for the future and meaning of public education, in light of the policies of detonation of the State proposed by Javier Milei, and, at the same time, places the Faculty of Philosophy of the UBA as an iconic place of the national academy, but also as the historical epicenter of the struggle of teachers and students.

“Puan” is ahead of its time but it does so because it reflects a certain institutional trajectory marked by resistance to budget cuts of different intensities and administrations. Now, logically, when the electoral proposal is directly an emptying of all levels, “Puan” can be read under the mantle of the symbols that marked generations of students and teachers who passed through their classrooms. Between the ideas of Heraclitus, Spinoza, Plato, Hobbes and Rousseau, the film transits the codes of comedy in the game between the script and the scenes, but at a certain moment the national reality is filtered and the story takes a turn that, at viewer, it will necessarily seem related to today.

“We wrote the script during the confinement of the pandemic and, although we knew that the threat to public education is cyclically latent in our history, we did not imagine arriving at the premiere with this sensation of a narrative of the present. But it is like that, at the same time public education in our country – from time to time – we have to defend it,” María Alché tells Télam about how “Puan” gained striking relevance in light of the cutback programs promoted by the La Libertad Avanza candidates.

Alché, who went to a public primary and secondary school in La Boca and studied at the National School of Experimentation and Filmmaking (Enerc), received, along with Naishtat, the award for best script in San Sebastián.

“We want to dedicate this award to the teachers who taught us to write and think about Argentine public education,” he said. Hours later, the Minister of Education Jaime Perczyk celebrated the award with a message that shows the extent to which the film invites debate: “We congratulate María Alché and Benjamín Naishtat for the award received in San Sebastián for the film Puan. This recognition It is a source of pride and gives us the opportunity to tell the world the importance of public education in our country.”

The story of the film, chosen to represent national cinema in the next Goya Awards, resonates with those who have passed through the classrooms of the public university: Marcelo Pena (role with which Marcelo Subiotto won Best Actor in San Sebastián) dedicated his life to teaching political philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires. His mentor, a highly respected professor, dies unexpectedly, and Marcelo feels heir to the professorship and all the construction of meaning – the bibliography, the adjuncts, the theorists – that surrounded him.

All this without imagining that Rafael Sujarchuk (Leonardo Sbaraglia, younger, well-traveled and more than enough) will return from Europe to compete for the vacant position. Marcelo’s clumsy efforts to prove that he is the best candidate spark a hilarious duel, while her life and his professional career spiral into chaos.

The political scientist and teacher Diego Sztulwark and the philosopher Jazmín Ferreiro and also students of the house helped the actors so that the film not only recreated the rich life of Puan but also maintained the credibility in the gestures, the anecdotes and the interaction in the roles.

The advertising campaign designed for the production to disseminate the film that arrived last Thursday in theaters throughout the country has an informal imprint that seeks to attract from aesthetics. For this, the posters emulate the university formats and parades were hung around the Faculty. The Teachers’ Union of the University of Buenos Aires, for its part, launched a 2×1 campaign to invite its members to the rooms.

It is not the first time that Puan becomes the protagonist of fiction and, from there, the magnifying glass is put on the logic and imprint of the institution. “Puan y su moda” was a blog that sought good taste in this high school before the existence of Instagram and, although it did not survive the era of social networks, it was able to give an account of what the aesthetic experience of studying was like. in the Faculty.

“Filo”, the novel that Sergio Olguín published in 2003 and which was republished by Alfaguara in 2017, has as its almost exclusive setting the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and its nearby bars.

“My parents’ generation had the La Paz café, the Moderno bar, the Di Tella Institute; we, more modest, already in a broken world, had the Puan patio. In architectural and landscape terms, the place was horrible: pure cement, illegible graffiti on the walls, gray on gray on gray. A quadrangle where people gathered to utter exaggerated monologues and smoke armed tobacco. If we raised our heads to look at the sky, we were interrupted by a white lattice, of uncertain function, although Someone once assured me that those bars were there in case someone jumped from the windows of the upper floors. A kind of net in the air, so that the potential suicide would not hurt the students who were chattering on the benches on the ground floor. It sounded a bit implausible to me, but that type of stories were also what the era was made of. A time of transition between two centuries, between an analog world and a digital one, between the world of stable jobs and that of precariousness. An interzone where everything was mutating, although we still didn’t realize it,” Mauro Libertella recovers in his latest novel, “An earlier future,” about a patio “in which nothing ever happened, but something always happened.”

“In the midst of the pandemic confinement, writing about Puan was a way to recover the desire to inhabit places, a longing. And in the different rewritings she became a kind of character, with her particularities. Later, when we decided to call her “Puan “That became a clearer question,” Alché admitted about the film, which notes the winks of the militants who ask for a minute to talk to the students, the teacher with a backpack and briefcase speaking for hours to four people and the small intellectual disputes where the ego is at stake.