cinematography
Verónica Balduzzi
Ignacio Masllorens
editing
Ignacio Masllorens
Sofía Di Paola
music
Gabriel Chwojnik
Ustym Petrovych
Gregor Quendel
sound
Leonardo Cardemil

cast
David Lamelas (as himself)
Constanza Feldman (Rocío)
Victoria Baldomir (Rosario)
Carmen Iriondo (Reneé)
Manuel Atwell (Fede)
Luís Felipe Noé
Marta Minujín
Leopoldo Maler

production
El Pampero Cine
co-production
El Rayo Verde
producer
Laura Citarella

Two female producers are commissioned to create a short documentary for an exhibition dedicated to Rubén Santantonín, an elusive figure of the Argentine avant-garde who died very young, in the late 1960s. However, the client imposes one unexpected condition: the video must be made together with David Lamelas, Santantonín’s former collaborator and today an internationally recognized figure of conceptual art. At first, the plan seems clear and limited in scope: Lamelas, accompanied by a young film crew, gathers archival materials, documents the few surviving works, and interviews curators and major artists – such as Luis Felipe Noé and Marta Minujín – who, along with Santantonín and Lamelas, peopled the legendary scene at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella. Lamelas gradually realizes that reconstructing the story of his friend also means confronting a series of gaps and contradictions. The institutional commission turns into something else. An intimate inquiry into the meaning of artistic creation and the possibility – or impossibility – of explaining a life through narrative. The film arrives at a fundamental question: if an artist chooses to erase his own traces, what does it mean to try to reconstruct them today? Is it an attempt to shed light on a forgotten history, or, inevitably, invent a new one?

Ignacio Masllorens

Selected filmography
2026 El fantasma
2026 Mi casa [suite entomológica] (short)
2023 Caudal (short)
2021 Atlas (co-directed with Guadalupe Gaona)
2021 Fanny camina (co-directed with Alfredo Arias)
2019 Historia de una casa (short)
2017 Trainspotter (short)
2015 El teorema de Santiago
(co-directed with Estanislao Buisel)
2014 The Girl from Downtown (short)
2014 Japonesita (short)
2013 Hábitat
2011 Martin Blaszko III

David Lamelas

Selected filmography
2026 El fantasma
2018 In Our Time (short)
2000 The Invention of Dr. Morel (short)
1978 The Dictator (short)
1976 The Hand
1974 Desert People
1972 Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning)
(short, co-directed with Hildegarde Duane)
1972 To Pour Milk Into a Glass (short)
1970 “Interview” with Marguerite Duras (short)
1969 Time as Activity | Düsseldorf (short)
1968 A Study of the Relationships Between Inner and Outer Space (short)

“The story of this film was also born of the conditions for its own production, and the tensions between what a film is expected to be and what it ultimately chooses to become. We decided to turn those circumstances into narrative material, and from there a small fable began to take shape, unfolding in the folds of the art world. The idea of bringing David Lamelas into this project was essential. Before becoming one of the pioneers of Argentine conceptual art, David met and worked with Rubén in his youth, almost as a disciple. Between them, a possible dialogue emerged: a celebrated, still active artist standing before another who is no longer here, yet whose presence still seems to reach us, like a ghost.” (Ignacio Masllorens)

“When I was invited to take part in this film about Rubén Santantonín, I felt it was not simply a matter of returning to an artist’s work, but of returning to a presence. Rubén was a dear friend of mine. He died young, and over time his work was partly forgotten, destroyed, and dispersed. Making El fantasma became a way of becoming close to him again. We did not want to make a conventional documentary. We wanted the film to inhabit a more uncertain space: between memory and invention, between testimony and fiction, between what happened and what can still be imagined. I appear in the film myself, but not exactly as I am; rather, as a version of myself. That shift interests me: the moment when reality begins to behave like fiction, and fiction reveals something true.” (David Lamelas)

Ignacio Masllorens is a filmmaker and visual artist. He studied image and sound design at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), where he currently teaches. His films and videos propose a reflective exploration of the internal mechanisms of cinematic storytelling, as well as the perception of time and space, drawing on materials such as found-footage and documentary records. His works have been screened at various film festivals and several venues including the Anthology Film Archives, the Cinémathèque française, the Filmmuseum München, ARCOmadrid Art Fair, and the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) among many others. He has received awards in visual arts competitions held by the Fortabat Foundation, the ArtHaus Foundation, the National Arts Fund, and the National Salon. In 2021, he won the Audience Award at the Biarritz Amérique Latine Festival for the film Fanny camina, co-directed with Alfredo Arias.

David Lamelas is an Argentine artist. A pioneer of Conceptual Art, he was involved in Argentina's avant-garde scene in the 1960s. In 1968, he became the youngest Argentine ever to participate in the Venice Biennale with Office of Information about the Vietnam War at Three Levels: Visual Image, Text and Audio, an installation that shortly afterward was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In 1993, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts and in 1998, the DAAD Stipendium from Germany. Well known for his sculptures, performances and installations, Lamelas divides his time between Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Paris.