In addition to co-founding Puma and developing film projects, Victoria Marotta has participated in international training programmes such as Berlinale Talents, Rotterdam Lab and EAVE, and has collaborated as an advisor and evaluator in co-production spaces in Latin America and Europe.
For his part, and in his role as a director, Jerónimo Quevedo premiered two of his short films, La mujer perseguida (2013) and Enfrentar animales salvajes (2014), at the SSIFF (San Sebastián). After their screening at the San Sebastián festival, the films were selected for more than fifty festivals around the world.
– T.R.A.P. (2018), 17´
– Parsi (2019), 23´
– Enfrentar animales salvajes (2014), 7´
– Siete años en Mayo (2019), 40´
Novos Cinemas celebrates its tenth anniversary with Un Puma, an Argentinian film production company based in Buenos Aires and co-founded in 2015 by producer Victoria Marotta and producer, filmmaker and screenwriter Jerónimo Quevedo. The latter will visit our city and share the modus operandi of a company to which we dedicate our first European spotlight.
Founded and led by Victoria Marotta and Jerónimo Quevedo, Un Puma (Buenos Aires, 2015) is the film production company responsible for feature films and short films screened and awarded at the Berlinale, Venice Biennale, Locarno FF, BAFICI, and Rotterdam IFF. Toronto IFF, New York FF, FIDMarseille, Tokyo IFF, Mar del Plata FF, Tate Modern, Harvard University, La Cinémathèque Française, among other festivals, exhibitions, museums, and universities around the world. In 2023, they released Arturo a los 30 (Forum – 73rd Berlinale), El auge del humano 3 (Concorzo Internazionale 76° – Locarno FF) and El repartidor está en camino (Special Jury Prize – Visions du Réel). They have received the Pardo d’oro from the Locarno FF (El auge del humano, by Eduardo ‘Teddy’ Williams) and the Golden Bear from the Berlinale (Un movimiento extraño, by Francisco Lezama). In 2023, the Bogoshorts festival dedicated a retrospective to the short films produced by their company. Un Puma is currently developing Hernán Roselli’s feature film project La escuela pesada.
It does not roar, but it keeps an eye on its claws.
In just ten years, Un puma has become an indispensable player in the auteur cinema scene in Argentina and South America. Since 2015, Victoria Marotta and Jerónimo Quevedo have been committed to a model that reflects a militant involvement in the processes that make up the various stages of each film, regardless of its length or genre. This approach to cinema has enabled them to build up an enviable body of work that has been screened and awarded prizes at major international film festivals.
Their radical commitment to developing projects by filmmakers—often emerging ones—with unique imaginations, whose specific circumstances and demands require them to approach each proposal using ad hoc methodologies—from the ideation process to subsequent support and promotion—gives an idea of how Un Puma lives and conceives cinema. This experience is evident in its radical defence of a form of production that shows that aesthetics, ethics and politics can and should go hand in hand. This is revealed by a long list of filmmakers—Ico Costa, Eduardo “Teddy” Williams, Martín Shanly, Agostina Gálvez, Manque La Banca, Konstantina Kotzamani and Martín Rejtman—who now enjoy unquestionable recognition from the programming teams of festivals, film libraries and cultural and contemporary art centres, critics and the public.
From our humble point of view, this unique concept brings Un Puma closer to the aesthetic and ideological principles of certain proposals developed in the field of literary and musical publishing. Based on this premise, it seems no coincidence that the company defines itself as an ‘author’s production house’. This sentence reflects the scope and objectives of its business. On the one hand, conceiving the company as if it were a house: a space that welcomes, protects, promotes and encourages the development of proposals of various kinds. On the other hand, expanding the concept of production and authorship: cinema emanates from a cooperative creativity that magnetises each of the phases that make up the different films, while exponentially or substantially amplifying their initial objectives.
And in this context, which conceives films as living (organic) entities, the work of the production company transcends its inherent functions — the search for capital, alliances with international agents, etc. — to promote the development and delivery of projects that are extremely sensitive to any unwanted incident that could alter their future. We find ourselves, then, in the realm of politics and, therefore, faced with a purely ontological question: making cinema possible and making a possible cinema.
In the selection that makes up this focus, we infer the existence of this line, as it operates on different levels: promoting synergies and conversations between films and between films and filmmakers—the case of Teddy Williams and Martin Shanly is evident—; between contemporary aesthetics and documentary cinema—exemplified in Parsi and its interaction between performative reading and visual immersion, or in Qué será del verano, a proposal that relates chance, archive, life and cinema—; between the tradition of auteur fiction cinema and its derivations—evidenced radically in the dislocation of expectations in T.R.A.P, in the updating of the generational narrative in a comedic key in Arturo a los 30, or in the unique combination of auteur genre cinema, magical realism and social criticism promoted by Electric Swan; between thoughtful cinema and practices inherited from avant-garde and experimental cinema—Enfrentar animales salvajes—as well as an implicit review of the medium itself as a vehicle for expression and reflection—as revealed by two works as different but complementary as El novio actual and Siete años en mayo.
What is evident, ultimately, is the generation of a biome, of a biodiversity where jaws and claws seem to be always alert, ready for action.