While Luis Ortega’s stunning 2024 film may be primarily an Argentinian title, as a Spanish co-production, jury members Vincent Jaskowski-Prowse, Leigh Singer and I were able to celebrate the title in style at this year’s festival. And, in the process, we discovered a film that has filled our dreams ever since.
I believe that the sign of a great director lie in his casting skills. What would Gandhi have been without Sir Ben Kingsley, or The Godfather without Marlon Brando. Or Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, without Denzel Washington. Notice I didn’t end the sentences with question marks because those are rhetorical questions I’m asking. Or not asking.
In his latest film Kill the Jockey, which premiered in Competition in 2024 at the Venice International Film Festival, Argentinian filmmaker Luis Ortega enlisted the help of fellow countryman Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, an actor he has collaborated with before in films and on a miniseries, to embody a character like no other we have ever encountered on the big screen. Biscayart is a César and Lumière Award winning actor and an acting force of nature. Once you watch him as Remo Manfredini, and all subsequent incarnations, you simply can’t stop thinking about him, his clothes, his dancing skills — and this film. Biscayart is, of course, no stranger to making us feel something different for the characters he inhabits, as he did with his turn in the 2018 film 120 BPM.
Joana Granero and Nahuel Pérez Biscayart at the Q&A for ‘Kill the Jockey’ inside the Ciné Lumière on Thursday evening
On the jury of the London Spanish Film Festival, we joked around that for us, particularly two of the voting members, there was a period we referred to as “Before the Jockey” and one that is “After the Jockey” — BJ and AJ. The films we watched in the second half of our journey all paled by comparison, and perhaps I should have followed my initial feeling, of watching this film last. Kudos to Joana Granero, the festival’s founder and the force behind the iconic Fashion & Cinema, for programming Ortega’s outstanding work as the closing night film. Because once you have watched Kill the Jockey (El Jockey in Spanish) there is no going back. Nothing feels quite the same again, and while I understand the impossibility of my statement, I imagine the film changed my cinematic DNA. It seems others also felt the way I did, as Kill the Jockey was Argentina’s submission to the 97th Academy Awards.
The story of the film is, you guessed it, about a jockey, in Buenos Aires, whose self destructive behavior gets him in trouble with the mobster he races for. Remo’s girlfriend Abril, also a jockey (and played divinely by the popular Spanish actress Úrsula Corberó Delgado) is pregnant with his child and to make matters even more complicated for the pint-sized sportsman, the horse he is racing crashes into a fence. With tones of Wes Anderson, in the production value of the film which looks like a multi-million dollar set and actually wasn’t, and a second half that sets the viewer completely free, instead of telling us what to think, feel and do about this outstanding story, the film becomes a voyage of self discovery. Within ourselves, the audience, we find nerve endings and ideas we never stumbled upon before, and for Remo, there is a journey through Buenos Aires, which — spoiler alert! — may or may be happening, complete with a brown fur coat, a handbag and a head bandage that Biscayart carries off like a modern-day version of Audrey Hepburn in Charade. All the side characters in the story are also fascinating people in their own worlds and many are non-professional actors, just men and women the filmmaker has run into in his native Buenos Aires.
Oh, and there is also a dance that makes you wish you could dance like that. I’ve included the video for your enjoyment.
Our jury statement, written by all three of us and announcing the winning film in the presence of Biscayart, inside the lovely Ciné Lumière in South Kensington on Thursday, read like this:
“While every film in the line-up had something to say to our minds, the winning film not only spoke to our hearts but also inhabited our dreams and invaded our thoughts from the moment we first watched it. For its ability to portray such a contemporary state of mind, at this exact moment in history — what it must feel like to want to escape one’s own body at the risk of so much — without dwelling on it or playing for laughter or tears — we decided to give our top award to ‘El Jockey’ (Kill the Jockey) directed by Luis Ortega.”
Perhaps Biscayart said it best, during a Q&A with Granero following the screening on the closing night of the LSFF. “I wouldn’t like to pollute your experience with my own experience,” the spellbinding, lithe actor replied to a woman in the audience who asked him for his own interpretation of this extraordinary film. “I can tell you that I really enjoyed doing this film in a very profound way because it’s also about acting — about embodying, about playing, in the most vivid sense of the word.” He continued by stating that he enjoyed thinking of “the notion of identity as a verb and not a noun, not a fixed practice. It raised questions I already had in mind when I read the script and it was the perfect gift for me at that moment, to undo things and put everything into context — the system is always trying to categorize everything and fix everything and label everything and this film is like this,” he gestured with his arms, like a bomb exploding, “the explosion, the total opening to possibilities and that we all have right now, right here and maybe are afraid to practice them.”
For that, for the freedom the film bestows on the viewer to walk away and imagine a story lived in our own shades of life, Kill the Jockey is the winner. The winning film of this writer’s fall season which blows the lid off our imagination, in a world of manufactured feelings and ideas fed to us by an increasingly homogenized system of cinema.
Kill the Jockey is being sold worldwide by Protagonist Pictures. It has yet to secure UK distribution even though it was one of the most watched releases in Argentina in 2024 and is streaming there on Disney+.
Photos courtesy of the London Spanish Film Festival, used with permission