Milagros Mumenthaler Hints at First Male-Led Film at ECAM Forum

Argentine-Swiss filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler is developing a new project that will mark a clear change in her career, as it will center for the first time on a young male protagonist. Speaking after an ECAM Forum masterclass in Madrid on June 11, Mumenthaler said the film is still in an early stage, has no working title, and is being described by her as a “rom-drama,” meaning a drama with a love-story element. She said the idea came from imagining a young male character and from wanting to explore material she felt she still owed to her younger self, especially something more connected to romance and emotional longing.

Mumenthaler said the project’s production structure is still undecided. In the past, her films have often been made as Swiss-Argentine co-productions, but she said that model is not fixed for this new work and that another country could be added. She stressed that she is only just beginning the process.

Her comments came during a public masterclass in Madrid that focused on how she develops films through images, locations, objects, sound and the physical condition of her characters. The session was held as part of a retrospective of her work, including her latest feature The Currents, her 2016 film The Idea of a Lake, and her debut Back to Stay, which won the Golden Leopard in Locarno.

Mumenthaler said that her starting point for a film is usually not a plot but a sensation or state of mind, often first appearing as an image. She described this approach in relation to Back to Stay, which follows three sisters living in a family house after the death of their grandmother. She said the house functioned as “home” rather than a claustrophobic closed set, and she used windows, weather, clothes outside and movement between rooms to keep the outside world present. She also said she imagined the camera as linked to the absent grandmother, shaping the film’s long takes and slow movements. Objects such as dresses and a grandmother’s corset were treated as carriers of memory and family history.

She also discussed The Idea of a Lake, which draws freely from Guadalupe Gaona’s autobiographical book Pozo de aire. The film deals with the disappearance of a father during Argentina’s dictatorship and was made with a strong sense of responsibility toward the source material. Mumenthaler worked with the book, family photographs, conversations with Gaona and visits to the house that inspired the text. She also tested several formats, including Super 8, 16mm, 35mm and HD, before choosing Super 16, while expressing her love for 35mm as cinema’s definitive format.

Her latest film, The Currents, pushes her interest in interior states even further. It follows Lina, played by Isabel Aimé González Sola, a woman who jumps into the freezing waters of Geneva and later returns to Buenos Aires as if nothing happened. The film premiered at Toronto, screened in San Sebastián and was released in U.S. art houses by Kino Lorber. Mumenthaler said every element of the film was filtered through Lina’s perception, from sound to color to city atmosphere. She described some scenes as “flights of thought” and said the film was guided more by fiction and subjective experience than naturalism.