In Defense of the Free Auteur

David Louis Zuckerman explores crisis and awakening in Amalia Ulman’s film, “Magic Farm,” at the 2025 Los Angeles Festival of Movies.

By David Louis ZuckermanMay 25, 2025

• Film

• Environment

THE BIO OF Argentine-Spanish writer-director Amalia Ulman’s Instagram reads: “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” and this dedication might be a good place to start when considering Ulman’s films and their future. We can say that this crisis is, in fact, a crisis of spectatorship, but we should not automatically assume it is self-willed. Acceleration, distraction, second screens, remoteness, time loss, artificial intelligence—such “developments” assault us externally, as viewers and creators, until we find our behaviors and identities subject to a new surreptitious hardwiring. Not all change is progressive, nor is fighting the loss of certain aesthetic forms necessarily conservative. Art cinema’s commitment to meditative temporalities, resistant to the hasty cycles of consumption and amnesia that mark the turn to “content,” may very well be at the core of its sustained relevancy.

Ulman comes to feature filmmaking from a career as a multidisciplinary visual artist, her identity that of an emerging auteur in a moment when auteur theory is itself facing a state of antagonistic redefinition. Historically, auteurism implies that the informed viewer should situate a director’s work within the context of their larger output, so that a “quilting” of ideas, fixations, metaphors, preoccupations, and thematic repetitions might become legible. This cannot happen overnight, but only over multiple productions and, therefore, many years. And while the theory has created difficulties for the question of authorship, the goal is not a denial of the medium’s collaborative nature but rather a broadening of its interpretative model and cultural value.

Some directors lend themselves to this model better than others. Ulman is one of them. Though she has only made two features, already we can trace the emergence of an auteurist cosmology. Both films look at the production of self-reliance in the absence of urban comforts and cultural access. Sometimes this self-reliance ignores the law, or the truth, while at other times it takes the form of creative invention, or even superstition and religious belief. Autobiographical elements are always present, as are signature motifs. There is never a strong wi-fi signal in an Amalia Ulman picture. Characters must climb trees to get online or stand on the edge of their bed holding a laptop up to the ceiling. Her films are messages sent from outside the metropolis, often highlighting the ways we, especially urban creatives, take our access and privilege for granted.

Ulman’s Magic Farm, her latest endeavor, had its L.A. premiere last month (to an audience of urban creatives, no doubt) on opening night of the newly inaugurated Los Angeles Festival of Movies. Founded by cineasts Micah Gottlieb and Sarah Winshall, the festival, now in its second year, has stated its ambition to “redefin[e] Los Angeles as a destination for independent film” and a “new nexus for the city’s burgeoning indie film community.” This year, MUBI was a presenter and Anora director Sean Baker attended the Magic Farm screening, straight from his Oscars sweep. If the idea of a “burgeoning” indie film community in Hollywood feels slightly paradoxical, it makes sense as the subversive outgrowth of a studio system that, in recent years, has done everything in its capacity to alienate its labor base. People are sick of the monopolistic consolidation of power, which has infiltrated culture as much as it has politics.

Unlike Ulman’s first feature, the formally elegant black-and-white El Planeta (2021), Magic Farm is an unhinged comedy in full color starring a mixed ensemble of Hollywood stars, Argentinian actors, nonactors, real family members, animals, and children. It’s a project that goes out on a limb and represents an artist in an exploratory state of aesthetic curiosity. GoPro-style cameras are placed on the backs of farm animals. Distorted lenses add obtuse points of view at random moments. The result is a moviegoing experience where the visual digressions and coded mise-en-scène are as significant as the narrative development. Perhaps, for this reason, initial reviewers dismissed the film as confounding or kitschy. But what emerges, if one looks beyond the structural looseness, is a bittersweet depiction of the everyday resilience of the rural classes in the director’s home country.

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Magic Farm follows a company of digital media creators from New York, known as Creative Labs. Led by their on-camera host Edna (Chloë Sevigny), they find themselves accidentally marooned in a rural Argentinian farming village. Ulman, who also starred in El Planeta, here plays a camera operator and the only Spanish-speaking interpreter among the North American film crew. With their producer Jeff (Alex Wolff), soundman Justin (Joe Apollonio), and the dubious executive Dave (Simon Rex), who quickly returns home to deal with a personal scandal, the crew of Creative Labs has arrived in the town of San Cristóbal to profile a musician named Super Carlitos. Yet they quickly discover that many San Cristóbals exist in Latin America, as it’s a common town name that translates to Saint Christopher (i.e., Columbus). By cosmic accident and due to their producer’s incompetence, they have chosen the wrong iteration (not unlike the turned-around explorer himself). In fact, the confusion runs in both directions. Their contact in Argentina, the religious “Marita” (Abuela Marita), purveyor of an Evangelical apocalyptic church, has herself mistaken the initials of Creative Labs (CL) for the North American denomination “Cristo Libertador.”

It’s tempting to explore this double error by stating that there are no accidents or mistakes, only the truth born of misrecognitions, a notion that may hold appeal for the Lacanian cinephile. Magic Farm is, in this sense, an absurdist comedy of misrecognition. The detachment of San Cristóbal from any singular place, along with the Argentinian misreading of the company initials, means that all parties quickly slide into communion with wild idiocy. Every good work of absurdism finally succumbs to jouissance, just as every lost-in-translation tale presents the paradox of human connection as only possible after, or contiguous with, a rough ride through disconnection.

Hence, the company, a send-up of Vice Media–style ethical ambivalence, begins to interpolate themselves into the Argentinian village, choosing to invent a subject in the absence of one. With the help of Popa (Valeria Lois), one of the village mothers and a community organizer, they cast the locals in their own manufactured viral dance trend. “I don’t want to exploit some person because they’re weird,” says Ulman’s Elena, to which her producer responds, “Well, you picked the wrong job!”

As the crew proceed with their contrived story, we learn that just over their head, figuratively and literally, is another very real story, namely globalization’s destructive effects on life in the agricultural zones outside of Buenos Aires. Crop-dusting planes are sickening the locals with toxic glyphosate agrochemicals. Children at school have fallen mysteriously ill, adults have died, the healthy are counting their blessings. Against this backdrop, Ulman presents the pop content creators as conspicuous avatars of modern brain rot and urban narcissism. The world they inhabit is one of vape chargers, Twitter, ketamine, skateboards, shrooms, STDs, good hair, and Bushwick thrift stores. They produce shallow, presentist trend pieces and have no real inclination to notice what is going on outside of the curated inner worlds they inhabit; they blunder around, wasting their workdays with vain distractions and libidinal urges.

The group’s men excel at mediocrity, while the women remain burdened by responsibility and feminine endurance. Ulman, to some degree, shies away from the latter, finding her muses in the male characters via a simultaneously mocking and desiring female gaze. Soon, Jeff is spending his days fixated on Manchi, Popa’s attractive daughter, played by Argentinian actress and model Camila del Campo. Manchi, in turn, desires Jeff, but only as another instance of misrecognition. Manchi’s path to recognizing Jeff as a weak-willed, sexually indecisive fuckboy produces some of the most effective satire in the film. At first, Manchi finds Jeff’s cultural origins attractive. She masturbates to his voice as he mansplains documentary filmmaking on a bro-ey New York podcast. Closing her eyes, she fantasizes the intonations of a world that feels unattainable to her, while all we hear are the whiny ramblings of an insufferable neurotic. When she later tells him that she thinks he has an attractive voice, Jeff can’t fathom the compliment, admitting he cried and didn’t leave his house for a week upon first hearing himself speaking on a recording.

Such asymmetries play out in the homoerotic relationship that develops between Justin and the local “Recepcionista,” played by the charming Guillermo Jacubowicz. In perhaps the most emotive subplot in the film, the two men explore their desire for each other through off-kilter encounters full of wholesome sexual tension. Casting here is key: the misaligned physiques of the youthful, muscular Apollonio and the rotund, graying Jacubowicz result in a tenderness reminiscent of certain moments in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The act of inscribing a naturally occurring element of beauty in the other, which the other has previously self-inscribed as defect, is a liberatory component of the misrecognition formula. It’s a cure that serves to break the narcissistic loop of the self. Many of the relationships in Magic Farm adhere to this logic. Manchi’s face (and Camila del Campo’s) bears a birthmark known as a “port-wine stain,” which, inside the fictional universe of the film, she and her mother are saving money to fix. When we are introduced to Manchi’s friend, TikTok star Mateo Vaquer (playing himself), we discover that the two are linked by somatic aberrations. Living with progeria, a genetic disorder causing premature aging in children, Mateo presents an image of physical adversity uncanny on the big screen. The friends are outsiders, with conditions reflective of an environment that has caused human life in the village to grow in unorthodox ways. Their inner strength and groundedness only serve to exaggerate the self-obsession and anxious flightiness of the North Americans.

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In both El Planeta and Magic Farm, Ulman forestalls reality’s intrusion into the frame until late in the story. In El Planeta, we come to understand that the mother, played by Ulman’s real mother, has been shoplifting in the seaside Spanish town where she and her daughter have been living. We can assume this low-level crime has been going on for quite some time, even if mostly off-screen. It’s only when the police show up at the apartment door one day and take the mother away that the film abruptly ends.

Rather than confront the truth, Ulman’s characters avoid reality until it’s too late. Similarly, in Magic Farm, in a scene after the one-hour mark, referencing Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), the crew must duck and run from a low-flying airplane that swoops down into the field to dust the crops. Only then does Elena finally understand what is happening in the village, and only after that does the Recepcionista acknowledge that the reason for his frayed vocal cords, according to his doctor, are the glyphosates.

In this way, the locals are also playing at a delusion. When Elena questions the toxins, the Recepcionista says, dismissively, “Let’s not dwell on sad things.” Even while the agrochemicals are threatening daily life, the local people ignore it, instead hoping for a blessing from God to keep them healthy. This is Magic Farm’s uncertain catharsis, which the crew’s production within the film brings to light. The viral dance pageant, produced by the foreigners and the villagers together, is constructed around a single emblematic prop. Each of the participants in the trend must wear a pink “gift bow” on their head. The message imparted by this minimal intervention is that “we are all gifts from God.”

As the silly entanglements of the New Yorkers begin to resolve themselves, for better or worse, the film takes a turn toward a mix of Spanish Catholic mysticism and Evangelical fatalism. It’s Ulman’s own grandmother, playing Marita, who sings a prayer at this stage: “Lord, soon you will return. To take us to the church where our father is. Where there is no sadness and no bitterness. Lord Jesus, cleanse my garments. Leave them free of stains and creases. For I want to enjoy the celebrations on high. The marriage supper of the lamb. My white garments.”

Directly from this prayer, the film cuts to Manchi kissing Jeff, the camera angled at the side of her face covered by the “stain.” Whether Ulman consciously intended for such a poetics to unfold in this juxtaposition of the symbolic effects of the toxic environments we all now inhabit and the prayer for garments “free of stains and creases” is perhaps irrelevant. Such synchronous moments tend to emerge from the artist’s trust in the creative process.

While, outside the fiction of the film, Campo’s birthmark has become a signature element of her modeling career and activism, within the film, the casting of her and Vaquer speaks to a critique of European perfectionism and conventional standards of beauty. This is something Ulman has also acknowledged while discussing the film’s use of cumbia music in the score. Cumbia, a musical genre originating in the slums of Colombia and disseminated throughout Latin America, intentionally avoids polish and traditionally beautiful sounds. It is a music whose form speaks to a politics of resistance, just as Manchi and Mateo, and aspects of Magic Farm’s cinematographic techniques, represent an analogous anti-aesthetics.

A talent for self-reflexivity is a key component of the auteur’s vocabulary. Some of the greatest works of cinema have been self-referential, autobiographical endeavors. When faced with an existential crisis, the director weaves it into the heart of their work. “The film industry in crisis” is, in some sense, the subject of this film, the allegory that emerges between “content” and “art,” finally, a question of attentiveness. The content creators, forced to exit their cycles of consumption and amnesia, learn to recognize something universally human in the connections they make on the farm. Whether this will be only a momentary revelation is hard to say.

Leaving the village, they look sad and hesitant to return to their lives. Perhaps it’s only that they have made some new friends who will be missed, or maybe they are awakening to their own toxicity, which they leave behind like a chemtrail in the sky.