Change for a Dollar: Argentine Comedy at the Brink of Anarcho-Capitalism

Moguillansky and Sandlund most pointedly assert their metacommentary with regard to the transnational economic exchange otherwise known as film production: “It comes as a new manner of producing art: a film festival from Copenhagen hires a Scandinavian artist, and a non-European filmmaker, preferably from the ex-European colonies, from exotic places as Africa, Asia, maybe South America, and they give them money to work together, in a film in between experimental collaboration and charity.” The metacommentary is made all the more strange in its delivery; these words are spoken by the film’s version of Benedictsson. Tracing a history of contemporary Argentine cinema from the formation of El Pampero Cine at the turn of the 21st century to Lezama’s nascent body of work, we begin to chart an ethnography of the dollar in Latin America: Lula da Silva’s recent campaign to disentangle the economy of Brazil and other nations from the US dollar was interceded by the election of Milei in 2023, who campaigned on and endeavors toward total dollarization of the Argentine economy. Gago—who organizes with the feminist collective Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) against debt, Milei’s austerity measures, and “the financial colonization of everyday life”—argues against a focus on the state and economic policy “from above” and toward a more robust understanding of “the pluralization of neoliberalism by practices from below.”3 For Gago, that entails an analysis of how neoliberalism is articulated, resisted, and reinscribed within informal economies or “communitarian practices.”4 At risk of an overly glib translation of a theoretical framework into optical metaphor, Lezama’s camera reminds us of cinema’s capacity to formulate a critique of what Gago has more recently called Milei’s “plunder neoliberalism,” by which she means his administration’s commitment to extractivism, land speculation, and austerity.