El Pampero Cine: Infinite Stories

When Argentina plunged into a deep economic crisis in the early 21st century, young filmmakers sought radically independent ways to make films, free from government funding and established production houses. From this movement emerged El Pampero Cine in 2002, founded by Mariano Llinás, Laura Citarella, Agustín Mendilaharzu, and Alejo Moguillansky. For them, independence was not a temporary necessity, but a fundamental artistic choice. With the ingenuity of amateur filmmakers and the resulting freedom, the group developed a unique, uncompromising film practice that endures to this day. 

Llinás’ Historias Extraordinarias (2008) serves as the foundational text for their oeuvre: a dizzying network of stories about spies and suitcases full of gold that continually defies classical narrative logic. Just as Sheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights wove story within story to survive, so too does narrative inventiveness at El Pampero Cine become a form of artistic survival. This urge to tell runs like a red thread through their work, from Trenque Lauquen (2022) to Pin de Fartie (2025). The focus is not on the individual stories, but rather on the inexhaustible pleasure of storytelling itself: films that constantly branch out, change direction, and invent new narrative rules with visible delight, sometimes for up to fourteen hours, as in Llinás’ La Flor (2018). Master storytellers Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Rivette, and Alfred Hitchcock, as well as Belgian comic artist Hergé, are important points of reference throughout their work.

El Pampero Cine distinguishes itself from many contemporaries through its adventurous quest for freedom. Not as an empty slogan, but as a way of working and of seeing. Their films refuse to be confined to fixed forms or straight lines; they constantly twist and turn towards escape routes and side paths. In an era where cinema is increasingly pushed towards uniformity and stories are neatly led from A to B, this attitude feels not only surprisingly political but also like an invitation to experience cinema anew as a space of play and imagination.