In Latin America when things are very corrupt or very sad, they often aren’t talked about. It is in bad taste to mention such things in front of guests. It is “impolite.”  

This idea of miscommunication between host and guest is what brought me to the unserious world of hipster journalism, typified in the 2010s by Vice News, where unserious, semi-gonzo film crews visit “third world” countries in search of a bizarre story and a catchy headline. While Jackass-meets-Travel-Channel sounds harmless enough, the explosion of this genre in the 2010s, revealed that much of what was being made was just the old ethnographic exploitation dressed in new “inclusive” disguise. (My interest in Vice and hipster media runs deep: my father is a Gen-X deadbeat edgelord skater who collected the original Vice Magazine in the 90s. Often, it was guys like him who were the bosses of my friends on these productions.)

I have been on both sides of the film’s host-guest equation throughout my life. I’ve been both the Latina immigrant with poor English and the gringa staying at a luxury hotel for an arts conference in Mexico City. Both the provincial girl going out of her way to host the visiting Yankees (maybe in an attempt to escape with them to a better place) and the white girl being shown around in poorer countries on careful, selective routes. 

This dichotomy is something I’ve always found fascinating (albeit exhausting) and it is something I hope is portrayed in Magic Farm. It is a film where, more and less innocently, everyone is lying to each other. On one hand, the American crew is more than willing to make the locals look stupid, and on the other, the Argentinians are not disclosing the whole truth about the dangers of being in the village. 

In my work I like to show silver linings and the beauty of human connection and collaboration in not-so-perfect settings. In El Planeta it was the mother-daughter relationship against the grim backdrop of an imminent eviction. In Magic Farm it is desire, curiosity, and interpersonal relationships in the midst of a health and environmental disaster. 

Like the Spanish Cold War classic Welcome Mr. Marshall! (dir. Luis García Berlanga, 1953), this is a film about many characters working together towards a common goal that is, ultimately, a lie. Despite my story’s  bitter ending, and the uselessness of the documentary that they fabricate (in fact, it will never even air), the characters develop relationships through the production that will alter the course of their lives. So their efforts at fiction have a value far more valuable and less cynical than they ever intended.