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The world premiere of the Argentine film The aroma of freshly cut grass, which participates in the official competition of the Tribeca Film Festival had a luxury guest on Saturday night. Martin Scorsese, one of the executive producers of this film directed by Celina Murga, participated in the entertainment offered to the artistic team at the headquarters of the Argentine Consulate in New York.
“Martin accompanied us throughout this process with assembly notes, ideas and many observations. His contribution was key for the film to turn out the way we wanted. He was very warm with all of us, and also very attentive to the situation that Argentine cinema is going through today,” he told LA NACION. Axel Kuschevatzkyone of the producers of the film, after the premiere gala and the cocktail offered at the Argentine consular headquarters located in the heart of Manhattan.
There Scorsese spoke with the director and with the two protagonists, Joaquín Furriel and the Mexican actress Marina de Tavira, one of the great figures of his country’s cinema, whom we know above all for his leading role in Rome, by Alfonso Cuarón, for which she earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. The Mexican star arrived at the meeting at the Argentine Consulate after her screening with her compatriot Diego Luna, the renowned actor who is also her partner.
Murga has a long creative bond with Scorsese since in 2009 the director of Taxi Driver, casino and The Moon Killers He became a mentor to the Paraná-born director for a year. It all started thanks to a scholarship that she received from an artistic initiative by the Rolex firm. Based on that collaborative work, Scorsese later joined as executive producer of The third shore (2014), Murga’s fourth feature film.
Now they met again for this project, a co-production between Argentina, Uruguay and Germany that tells, in mirror image, two parallel stories of extramarital affairs starring two university professors and two students. The teachers are personified by Furriel and De Tavira, along with a cast made up of Romina Peluffo, Alfonso Tort, Emanuel Parga and Verónica Gerez.
The film will continue its journey at other international festivals and its premiere in Argentine cinemas is expected for the last part of 2024. As anticipated, The aroma of freshly cut grass explores marital relationships and emotional bonds at home and in work and teaching spaces through various prisms: sexism, feminism, differences in the treatment of these relationships according to gender and social mandates.
“The screening was excellent, it was a full house, there was a question and answer session at the end, as is usual at international festivals, and the first reviews were spectacular,” Kuschevatzky added. There will be two more screenings within the festival on Thursday the 13th and Friday the 14th. The aroma of freshly cut grass was selected in the official International Narrative competition, which has as jurors the British producer Daniel Battsek, the actress of the same origin Fiona Shaw and the Iranian director Ashghar Farhadi. The exhibition concludes on Sunday the 16th.
For Kuschevatzky, The aroma of freshly cut grass It’s a movie about relationships, but it formally has the structure of a thriller. “As in a Fritz Lang film, the characters cannot fight against fate and have to face its inevitability. Celina Murga is one of Argentina’s leading filmmakers and this film finds her at the top of her wonderful game, with her gaze focused on the complexities of marriage,” the Argentine producer told Variety a few days ago.
The aroma of freshly cut grass, whose international title is The Freshly Cut Grass, It has a script by Murga, director Juan Villegas (who is also one of the producers) and Lucía Osorio, with the collaboration of Gabriela Larralde. It was filmed in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. In a very complicated year for Argentine cinema, the presence of this film in the Tribeca Festival competition (which in 2001 had among its creators and mentors Robert De Niro) makes it so far the local production with the greatest prospects for international projection.
Along with Scorsese, Murga, Furriel, de Tavira and Kuschevatzky were also part of the delegation that accompanied the premiere of The aroma of freshly cut grass at the Village East by Angelika complex, located in the East Village of Manhattan, the actress Romina Peluffo, the casting manager María Laura Berch and the producers Cindy Teperman, Phin Glynn, Valeria Bistagnino, Fidela Navarro and Tomás Eloy Muñoz.
