Sofía Petersen Embodies Tierra del Fuego in ‘Olivia,’ at Locarno

A town of contradictions comes to life in Sofía Petersen’s debut “Olivia” which had its world premiere Aug. 13 at Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present. Filmed on 16mm Kodak Ektachrome across a non-stop 45 day shoot, Petersen expands her exploration of mysticism and disappearance in southernmost Argentina – plunging head-first into a father-daughter relationship upended in the sleepy mountains of Tierra del Fuego. 

Produced by the U.K.’s Animitas Cine, with Vitrine Filmes and San Sebastian’s Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, “Olivia” first caught attention by receiving post-production support from the Rotterdam Festival’s HBF+Europe program in 2024. It then played Ventana Sur’s Dale selection in December.

The fluidity that is so perceptible in “Olivia” goes back to its genesis. For Petersen, meeting Tina Sconochini, who plays the film’s titular character, was one of the starting points in conceiving the film.  

“We met with the desire of searching, without necessarily wishing to find. We started meeting twice a week for a long period of time, just to explore and let things happen. At first, without the camera, and then I started filming her.” 

In fact, Petersen and Sconochini met back in 2017. Petersen began writing the screenplay after the collaborators had discovered “the body of Olivia.” They did not develop a character per se, but were looking for “the essence.” 

There is an animistic quality to Olivia, her gaze – vacant, her movements – somnambulic. Trapped in a triangle-shaped house, Olivia is like a cocooned insect, which she pins on the wall, sleeping by night and living by day. “We just searched for a body. Not even a character.”

Animals of different sizes permeate the screen. Apart from the insects crawling on Olivia’s hands, cows in the slaughterhouse inhabit the film’s world alongside Olivia. The impetus for Olivia to dart away from her protected cocoon is to search for her father, who disappears one night. Olivia, bewildered and frightened, runs to the vast body of Tierra del Fuego to look for him. 

The search brings her to the communal slaughterhouse, draped in shadows. There, a row of cows waits for their execution. From the poetic and the mystical, “Olivia”transitions to the cold and the mechanical, reflecting the inhumane nature of abattoirs. Amid the roaring thunder of shotguns, the scene might as well be taken from “Earthlings.”

“There are deaths that are very gradual, and there are others that are very sudden. And in our lives, the sudden ones are not graspable,” says Petersen.

She filmed in a municipal slaughterhouse in Tierra del Fuego, featuring its tight community of real workers. “We decided to self-fund the film because nobody was going to want us to portray this. Everybody is trying to hide what happens there,” says Petersen. “But these people were so honest and open, it’s really impressive. They just let us in.”

The interplay of life and death that happens at the slaughterhouse daily expands Petersen’s fascination with the impossibility of certain elements coexisting, like fire and water: “It is between being here and not being here, between death and life, between sleeping and death, between light and darkness, between the sun and the moon.”

In one scene, when a young bovine is about to be killed, cinematographer Owain Wilshaw zooms in on the cow’s eye, evoking the powerful opening image of the film – Olivia’s black, widely open eye, reflecting flames and water. 

Boundaries between the real and the dream-like extend even in casting. Dario Haro, the 73-year old man playing Olivia’s father, is a local within the community. “The character of the father was different to what was written. But he came and completed it in a way that I would have never written.” 

Shooting non-actors on film wasn’t without challenges – with only a crew of six people shooting the film’s crucial exteriors within 10-minute windows at dawn or dusk. The absence of electricity during the shoot and lack of dailies to check also made the project an immense risk. “We didn’t have the possibility of doing more than one take,” says Petersen. “But I think the film now contains a lot more than it could have had if it wasn’t that way.”

Drawing helped Petersen find the film’s language: vibrant colors amidst silhouettes. Sound designer Pietu Korhonen renders Olivia’s solitude palpable using gusts of wind and deafening silences while Utsav Lal’s music punctuates the film’s emotional distress and peace– from the spontaneous chorus of copla mid-bus ride to dance breaks in semi-empty bars. Even the lullaby that serves as the film’s sonic anchor was written by actress Carolina Tejeda for her firstborn child. “I was searching for a song and when she shared it with me, it became a part of the film.” 

Petersen’s connection to music ties to her philosophies of cinema and the community she draws from: “Music is unbounded. There’s something in it that is eternal. It makes you wonder what we would have communicated if speech wasn’t there.”