By Josh Gardner, Festival Correspondent
Argentine filmmaker Agustina San Martín is making her mark in the Discovery section of this year’s Toronto Film Festival with her bold debut film, To Kill the Beast. A lush, sweaty, piece of tropical gothic, the film stars Tamara Rocca as Emilia, a teenager searching for her missing brother in the border region between Argentina and Brazil. But while a mysterious “beast” terrorizes the town, Emilia sets off on a journey of self-discovery and sexual awakening.
Just before the first public screening of the film, we talked to San Martín about sexuality on screen, working with ballerinas, and the future of filmmaking in Argentina.
Can you tell us the inspiration for the film?
Agustina: The inspiration for the film was mostly to try to seek moments of ambiguity in the life of a teenager who is finding herself and her sexuality, and how that sort of gives her enough strength to confront everything that she might have feared before. That was the main idea that we conceptualized. And in terms of the imagery and textures, I really liked to work with images from dreams, or to try to find all this plastic, dream-like, fantasy-like images that appear randomly in the human brain.
The textures were so rich and the lush scenery seemed to be very specific to that border region, so how much of these images were discovered on location or were they all scripted?
The biggest part of it was actually in the middle points of production. I made a book to take to the shooting that I've been preparing for a long time. I had every scene in there and all the screenshots of movies that I wanted the scene to look like. And then drawings of the storyboard and notes, or maybe ideas like, oh, I really liked this resource of, I don't know, flashlights passing by through the mirror or okay, this is the moment, this resource. It was like a crazy person's map in this huge bible. So, in that sense, there was a lot of build up before arriving to the set and then there was a lot of build up with the VFX.
How much did you use the VFX to achieve the dream-like feeling you were going for?
We didn't have so much money to have real mist or real fog. We have just like one little machine that was in the middle of the jungle, it was like nothing. So, we couldn't achieve fog in certain moments. We only could achieve fog when me and the DOP would, alone, wake up at like 4:00 AM and go and seek fog and because of the union, we couldn't tell anyone else. But the thing that we did the most with the VFX artist, Maria Peralta, was mist 100%. And then, because she also loves ambience and really loves what she does, we’d be like, yeah, let's do this and yeah and this and this. So, we started slowly then adding maybe a dim light behind the fog, a flickering light, things like that. But that was the biggest thing- we added some churches in the background, but that was it.
Going back to the exploration of sexuality. A lot of mainstream cinema is kind of sexless, at least mainstream cinema, especially when it comes to female pleasure. What did you want to explore in terms of showing sexuality on screen?
Well, I knew that I didn't want to do like a typical sex scene or a typical sexual situation in that way, but I wanted to try to find the sensuality in everything. Like she goes to a party and all these sweaty bodies surround her. And I was definitely trying to find, somehow, like this sensuality was all around. When aiming to do the sex scene, I already knew that I didn't want to do it the way it's usually done, but also, I didn't want to not do it. And that led into this moment that I felt really strongly about, the camera just leaving the actors, but we still hear everything. And it really enables a side of the story of still trying to tell these things just by using other ways of doing it.
I’ve heard you discuss the main character's journey as an exorcism. What role does religion play in the film
The role of religion is mostly, I believe, as an opposite to Emilia and her coming out story. These places are usually very religious. So, it just felt natural that religion would be present and also because all these people are praying to be saved from, or to be protected from this apparent beast that is haunting the town. I felt that in Emilia having whatever she has with another girl, it was important to have this opposite force, the sounds of the church and the people of the church whose presence somehow make her feel dirtier or make her feel more uncomfortable with whatever she is at that moment of the movie.
The lead actress is striking, and she does a lot with very little dialogue. How did you work with her to create the performance?
We grabbed her from casting. She was a ballerina since she was very, very small, like professionally. She left the academy because they wouldn't give her good roles because of her body shape and so she was like, fuck these people. And she came to the casting. I was magnetized by her face. I felt that maybe the best decision for this main character was to have someone that I felt so magnetized by. And we also created a great bond, we really liked each other, we really cared for each other. And directing her was quite easy because she was a ballerina. She had a lot of consciousness on her own body. So in that sense, I think that we could manage to really understand each other. And also she was always exactly in the spot that she needed to arrive. You are like, "Okay, because of the focus, you need to walk through here, here, here, and then do this." And she was like, "Oh yes!" And like you told her once and she already felt it, she almost arrived to the closest millimeter and you were like, "Damn. Yeah, we need to hire more ballerinas."
Your film is premiering in a kind of post-COVID, (hopefully), world. I was wondering what your thoughts are more broadly on Argentine cinema, as we ease back out of the pandemic?
The thing that I know is that it's getting harder and harder to do films. Moreover, our auteur driven films. There is the INCAA, but the finances and budgets are never enough or you need to wait like five years to get them. Maybe you don't get it. So it's getting harder. Also, we've had a lot of economic crises, as everyone else, but also it was not the time for us to have more economical crises. It’s just made it way harder for bigger producers to want to dare, for maybe these auteur driven stories. So, it's been way harder, it's getting more competitive. It's not great, but filmmakers are resilient and people find ways to tell stories. Maybe it brings a good change. I don't know, I'm just trying to be super positive.
You’re in Toronto presenting the film, in-person. Can you talk about what that means to be in the festival, and how it’s been going so far?
Well, we're going to premiere the film in a couple of hours.
Oh, wow.
Yet I have no idea how it's going to be. I know it's going to be super, super, super weird because I have been working on it for nine years. So I just know I need a tequila and that's all I know. It has been great. I have already met very cool people. I haven't been able to see films yet because of all the things that I had to do prior to that. But I'm excited. After today, I'm just going to start watching films and enjoying this COVID style festival, which is still very exciting because it's a privilege to be able to premiere a film, physically. I just feel so lucky that I can do that.
