\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t \t\u201cIt\u2019s not for us.\u201d Anyone who has ever pitched a movie has heard those words. But when Luis Ortega was looking for financing for his latest feature, the surrealist, gender-bending Kill the Jockey, he heard it a lot. \tIt didn\u2019t matter that Ortega\u2019s work had been making waves in Argentine cinema since his first feature, 2003\u2019s Caja Negra, or that his prior feature, El Angel, competed in Un Certain Regard in Cannes in 2019. Kill the Jockey, about a jockey whose identity \u2014 already fragmented by trauma, drugs and alcohol \u2014 repeatedly transforms following a racing accident and its accompanying head injury, was just too esoteric. \t \t\u201cThis movie is not pitchable,\u201d Ortega admits. \tAnother potential reason for\u00a0all those passes? \u201cPineapple Head. That\u2019s [what] the film was called,\u201d Ortega says, alluding to a homeless man in Buenos Aires who \u2014 walking around the city in a fur coat, one sandal and one woman\u2019s high-heeled shoe, a handbag on his arm and a giant pineapple-shaped bandage on his head \u2014 partly inspired the film. \t\u201cIt sounds better in Spanish: cabeza de pi\u00f1a,\u201d Ortega says. \u201cThat\u2019s one thing I did kind of give up on, because everybody was like, \u2018Luis, you want to do this film. No one, no one, wants to do it. But if you call it Pineapple Head, you definitely won\u2019t film this, like, ever.\u2019\u202f\u201d \tOrtega compromised on the title, but he got the last laugh. Jockey won the Horizons Award at the San Sebasti\u00e1n International Film Festival after screening in competition at the Venice International Film Festival. Protagonist Pictures is handling sales at the AFM. \tOrtega was unwilling, however, to compromise on his vision of protagonist Remo Manfredini (Nahuel P\u00e9rez Biscayart) and his dreamlike journey toward self-realization, which involves trying to evade his mobster boss, obsessively weighing himself in drugstores and transforming into a pert female prison inmate named Dolores. Not that Jockey offers up any easy answers about the nature of identity. If anything, the arc of Manfredini\u2019s story is more like a magical wheel where with every revolution, one persona dies and another is born \u2014 and hopefully each new identity inches closer to the truth of who he really is. \t\u201cIn a way, every character is a prison. No matter what character you build, you\u2019re caught; you\u2019re caught up in some kind of definition of what that character is,\u201d Ortega says. \u201cSo I believe you have to kill every single one of your characters to be free.\u201d \t \tOrtega found inspiration in a lesser-known work by Jack London, the 1915 novel The Star Rover. In the book, a university professor named Darrell Standing is serving a life sentence in San Quentin State Prison and is made to wear \u201cthe jacket,\u201d a painful compression device that real-life prisoners were made to wear as punishment. The excruciating pain pushes him into a trance state where he experiences some of his past lives. \t\u201cHe\u2019s in ecstasy because, he said, \u2018They can\u2019t kill my immortality, they can\u2019t strangle my immortality, no matter how much they torture me,\u2019\u202f\u201d Ortega says. \u201cAnd I thought that was so great. I thought that that\u2019s what happens with [Manfredini]. It kind of converts into this character where he\u2019s a man, he\u2019s a jockey, he\u2019s a drug addict, he\u2019s a man, he\u2019s a drifter, he\u2019s a woman, he\u2019s the mother of those kids in the street \u2014 all those possibilities are real and [possibly] true. \t\u201cI don\u2019t know if they\u2019re real,\u201d he adds. \u201cBut they\u2019re true.\u201d \t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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