The jockey, the Argentine-Spanish co-production directed by Luis Ortega that competes in the Horizontes Latinos section of the San Sebastian Festival, is the film selected by the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences of Argentina to represent the country in the next edition of the Oscar Award and in the Goya Awards.
The selected film will be an Argentine ambassador in the search for the prestigious award given by the Hollywood Film Academy in the category of Best International Film and at the Goya Awards it will compete in the category of Best Ibero-American Film.
The project of The jockey, selected for Proyectos Ibermedia – Coproduction 2022, it started with a homeless man that Ortega met on the street: “Everyone knows him in Buenos Aires. I have a theory that it unfolds and that there are several because it is in different neighborhoods at the same time, it seems taken from another dimension.” He claims that one day he started following him down the street and I saw him going into all the pharmacies. “When I went to approach him at the third pharmacy he told me: ‘In all the pharmacies I weigh zero on the scale, I don’t exist, but they are following me!’, and he ran away. “That concept of not existing, but feeling like they are persecuting you seemed like a good premise to me,” expressed the director in San Sebastián.
The fact that the protagonist was a jockey came later through a friend who took him to the racetrack and “I immediately thought that this character could be a jockey who fell off his horse, woke up in the hospital, took the mink coat, purse and shoes of a woman who was there and left. “The homeless man was also dressed as a woman when I met him and he was an inspiration for the film.”
