We are all striving for something, and while we do it for subsistence, others do it for
consistence. Thus, the sense of crisis is extensive, whether you are at the center of it
all, or out in the margins, like most of us, and if you don’t perceive it, it is because
you’re probably senseless.
It was precisely at the margins of the Rotterdam Fest, last winter of 2025, after a very
much politicized panel regarding the current state of affairs in queer filmmaking
(moderated by M. Molineaux), that we came across the possibility of a strategic group
of sorts that would assert us against what I had just referred to as “market fascism”.
And as this term would later prove to be controversial within our own group, I will
take a few lines to expand on it.
During our Rotterdam panel interventions, the debate veered toward how LGBT+
identities were being targeted by extremist politics as a scapegoat for late capitalist
maladies. The president of my country, an exponent of this trend, just a few days
before, at the Davos Forum, had not only equated homosexuality with pedophilia, but
also pointed at our equality agenda as one of the reasons for the stagnation of western
economies, if not the main.
To what extent public manifestations like these may be called “fascist” is a question
we ask ourselves every fucking day in our country. Where does fascism begin?
When? Could it be, as in an Orwellian neo-language, that fascism is now a matter of
degrees? In order to count these degrees, we could measure the intensity of things like
public threats to artists and the scapegoating of minorities; their life or death
consequences determining whether we may be hence in front of a full-fledged
fascism, whose higher degree would, of course, be the advent of a genocide.
The graduation of different intensities of fascism may also explain the passive
acceptance facing authoritarism’s new encarnations, an enerving realization once we
remember how fascism was historically allowed by those who remained silent in a
time when past western democracies were also under chronic economic distress. And
the role of cinema and its derivatives, the network of audiovisual narratives
interwoven for global attention, do you think is not indifferent to the anomie that
precedes this state of affairs?
As an artist and also as an Argentine, me, myself, I firmly believe this, witnessing
how our government not only vindicates the genocides that ravaged our country, but
also fosters the transition of the popular mood from initial silent support to the
outright hatred towards the portions of society that systematically targets with its
dehumanization campaigns. It is up to you if you think that we, as media artists, have
nothing to do with it, either by action or by omission, but everything I’m doing, since
I grasped it, is guided by this awareness. You may deride it as some kind of epyphany
if you wish, my own road to Damascus. I don’t mind.
I also believe that there’s no innocent connection between political neoconservatism
and formal neoclasicism. The synchronicity between the enthronement of US-
American neoclasicism with Reaganomics forty years ago; the recent alt-right
preeminence with the progressive erasing of the market share for most revolutionary
narratives, and the association of the resulting inability of many younger generation
enthusiasts to assimilate disruptive language structures (something that was
commonplace for their grandparents), with the easy acceptance of bigotry as a most
suitable way of revolting on the one hand, or the impotent disbelief of doing anything
of significance to avoid it, on the other one. Because art shapes consciences, you
know? It does.
Our artistic quest should be the restoration of a revolutionary faith, not only while
producing art, but also when making it known, getting it discussed, getting it read
even beyond their makers’ intentions, towards the common construction of a shared
future. And that’s also art in the making, and we are all part of it. Individualism is the
greatest scam of our age. Let’s get out of it as fast as we can! An authoritarian wave as
global as the one we are headed into should not be faced individually if we don’t want
to fall into discouragement. As little as the scale of our own actions may appear when
measured separately, they can grow to heroic significance when perceived into a
wider, collective epic to defeat the rising dark forces.
Many cis-het pals relativize our radicalization as limited to our queerness, as if this
was leaving them aside. But you don’t have to shove a dick up your ass to realize that
there are more important things at stake. If the queer crowd is one of the minorities
that’s being targeted, what’s wrong with our radicalization? We are not leaving anyone
out of the discussion by doing so! Why should we do such a dumb thing when all we
are aiming for is to build bridges towards higher confluencies? Our best
accomplishment would be the opening of portals for a decolonized pluriverse of
identities that may defy the close market logic that hovers over the homogenization of
world audiences!
The original goal we had when we first planned this venture, was a joint premiere of
our films at venues that wouldn’t be interested in programming us if we asked them
individually. Our films were apparently very different from each other, but we shared
the experience of creating outside the cannon and a common worry against rising
fascism, coming to the idea that this could foreshadow a tendency among modern
filmmakers that may spark some notice.
But soon we were making bigger plans, because, you know?, this is what happens
when people interact at a human level, exchanging the little we have: our experience,
faith, and the possibility of inspiring a different way to practice the craft of movies,
away from the all-pervading squareness that has not only stripped screens of most of
its cultural diversity, but that is emptying the venues of bored spectators as well. Such
an alternative is possible. It doesn’t matter if we are not the ones that individually
fulfill it in the first place. This idea has to be repeated until understood by most: it
could be different. It can really be better, get it? Miraculously so…
Goyo Anchou
Buenos Aires, May 25th 2025