14 | Sight&Sound | April 2020Who is she? The 34-year-old filmmaker made
history when, in 2019, her feature debut The
Sharks (Los tiburones) became the first Uruguayan
film to screen in Sundance, where she won the
World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award. The
film has since travelled the global festival circuit.
Her background: Garibaldi graduated from the
Uruguay Film School (ECU) in Montevideo in
2010 with her short film Mattresses (Colchones). She
wrote the script for The Sharks in 2012 and spent
two years developing the film with her lead actress,
newcomer Romina Bentancur, before shooting it.
Her films: The Sharks is the blackly comic
chronicle of aloof 14-year-old Rosina (Bentancur)
who sends a coastal tourist town into a panic
with her claim that she saw a shark. She develops
a crush on older teen Joselo (Federico Morosini),
and her attempts to woo him gradually shift
from awkward to disquieting. The film expresses
Garibaldi’s fascination with “characters who
are attracted to doing the wrong thing”. In
Screen International, Wendy Ide remarked that it
“provides a transgressive twist on the coming
of age picture” and “shares something of the
inchoate unease of early Lucrecia Martel”.
While Martel’s influence is incontestable,
Garibaldi distinguishes herself with a knack for
uncompromisingly unsentimental portraits of
female adolescence. Her latest project, The Last
Queen, leaves teens behind to focus on a mother
and her adult daughter in a dystopian present-day
where women are inexplicably disappearing.
Where to watch: Colchones can be viewed
on the ECUcinemateca YouTube page.
Nicholas KouhiA finny thing happened: The Sharks
ILLUSTRATION BY LUCINDA ROGERS
The Iranian director Marjane Satrapi on the cinema where she discovered
French cinephile culture and Pasolini, and developed a Borat habit
The first cinema that
instilled a cinephile
devotion in me was Le
Grand Action in Paris.
I discovered it in the
early 1990s through
this paper booklet
called L’Officiel des
spectacles – which still exists, thank God. It
lists all the films that are shown weekly in
the city. Each time there was a film I wanted
to watch it was screening in Le Grand Action.
So, I went there, and soon enough it became
my favourite place to go. I remember seeing
Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers
[1960] there. I loved the film before, but it was
even more heartbreaking seeing it on the big
screen, and my love became an obsession.
Le Grand Action has two screens [one
named after the film archivist and co-founder
of the Cinémathèque française Henri Langlois]
with around 320 seats, all in the heart of the
Quartier latin, on the rue des Écoles near the
Sorbonne. Naturally, many students go there,
and the audience is not only diverse, spanning
all ages, but deeply passionate. When the
cinema opens at nine in the morning, you
already have five people inside. A crowd of 40
for a Pier Paolo Pasolini film is not uncommon.
They show a mix of old and new films. You will
never see a Batman movie there, but I saw
both Borat [2006] and Brüno [2009] aboutfive times in a row. And each time I laughed
more, bringing new people to each screening.
In Tehran, I went to the cinema as a child. My
dad was a cinephile. Any film from the 1950s
and 60s he had probably seen. I saw all of
Bruce Lee’s films and King Kong [1976] and The
Towering Inferno [1974]. But when I was nine,
the revolution happened, and with it came the
war. I didn’t go to the cinema as frequently until I
moved to Austria, and even then, I’d go once in a
while to a film that all the kids would see, like To p
Gun [1986], 9 ½ Weeks [1986] or Angel Heart
[1987]. When I came back to Iran, I saw some of
Abbas Kiarostami’s films, but most other movies
showing were propaganda features. A lot of
what I watched came from a guy who brought
us films. He was like a drug dealer, carrying
a suitcase full of forbidden works on VHS.
Le Grand Action was the first real love of my
movie-going life. The French have retained this
cinephile culture, even in the age of Netflix,
which I must confess I have never watched. The
same goes for any television series. I remember
trying to get into True Detective and giving up
after two episodes because I was bored with it.
Watching films at home is great, but I believe
seeing a film for the first time should be a
cinematic experience. You’re in a black room.
You’re focused and cut off from your life. It’s
a trip. I remember, in my great arrogance, I
thought that I knew Citizen Kane [1941] after
seeing it twice on VHS. I thought it was too
hectic. Then I went to see it at Le Grand Action.
Everything took on another dimension and then
you understand this is why it’s so great. To truly
discover a film, you have to go to the cinema.
Marjane Satrapi was talking to Nicholas
Kouhi. Radioactive is released in UK cinemas
on 20 March and is reviewed on page 73DREAM PALACES
LE GRAND ACTION, PARISRISING STAR
LUCIA GARIBALDI‘ Seeing a film for the first
time should be a cinematic
experience. You’re focused and
cut off from your life. It’s a trip’