An American filmmaker arrives in the Argentinian pampa to film “Matadero”: a foundational tale of class struggle where a group of laborers slaughter their bosses like cattle. It is 1974, the violent persecution of the left has just begun in Argentina, and the young actors in the film are on the verge of taking a leap into full time clandestine militancy.

Every time one class tries to speak on behalf of another, tensions and struggles arise over the portrait that some propose of the others: Matadero tries to stage these tensions. Explores a conflictive universe that’s been present in our country since its origins: the first Argentine fiction, “El Matadero” by Echeverría, brutalizes the popular class by proposing a violent and resentful portrait where a group of slaughterers become outraged and kill a rich man like a cow in a slaughterhouse: the most emblematic building of the Argentine imaginary, the “asado” plant.

I wrote the script with two Argentine friends who don’t come from cinema, Edgardo Dobry, a poet, and Lucas Vermal, a philosopher. That was very important because their contributions enriched my view, which comes more from cinema.

The representation of the class struggle and its violence opens us to the universal problem of what happens when we represent something: is it amplified, revealed, reproduced? Every era of strong conviction is also one of strong doubt. We decided that those doubts should have an important place in our work.

Santiago Fillol