As a young girl in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Agustina San Martín didn’t know much about the world of filmmaking. “There is no one in the film industry that I knew growing up. I didn't even think it was a possibility. I didn't think it was a job,” she says. “When I was a child, saying you wanted to make a movie was like saying you wanted to be an astronaut.”
She could dream though—and she was inspired by blockbusters that screened when she was growing up in the 1990s. San Martín can still recall how watching films in a dark theater with her mother impacted her development.
From that point on San Martín endeavored to become a director in her own right, striving to perpetuate her own vision. She knew what she wanted to do: She asked her parents if she could use the money they had set aside for her quinceañera party to make a feature film. She took inspiration from directors who came before her, building on what they had done while developing her own vision.
In 2020, the Argentinian filmmaker was selected to join the Rolex mentoring program, which is part of the company’s Perpetual Arts Initiative. The program was founded in 2002 to enable an exchange between different generations. It has brought together 63 pairs of talented artists from 41 countries, including pairings such as Spike Lee and Kyle Bell, Phyllida Lloyd and Whitney White, Kazuyo Sejima and Yang Zhao, and Martin Scorsese and Celina Murga.
San Martín found herself paired with director, composer, actor, and Broadway talent Lin-Manuel Miranda for two years of close collaboration. The mentorship culminated with the premiere of Childhood Echoes, a hybrid documentary film and magical apparition during the Rolex Arts Weekend (September 2022) in Brooklyn, New York. This work followed San Martín’s successful first feature film, To Kill the Beast, which had its world premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.
San Martín is the ideal pupil: taking what she learned working with Miranda and applying it to her own work. She is currently working on a project with Janicza Bravo, an American director, producer, and screenwriter whose films include the award-winning short Gregory Go Boom. For San Martín, the partnership with Bravo is a dream come true. “I already knew your work,” she says during a conversation with the multihyphenate talent. “I already felt you had some level of insanity that I loved and craved. And when there was this opportunity to work with you, I was like, yes.”
Like San Martín, Bravo grew up feeling like an interloper in the artistic community. Her parents, while supportive, weren’t filmmakers. Neither was anyone else she knew. “I felt kind of like an outsider because I had not gone to film school,” Bravo says. “My thinking was that you needed to go to film school to be in this space. So many of the people that I was around were also telling me that I didn't necessarily belong.”
It was a friend who changed her mind: “A very good friend was like, no one's going to invite you, and the only way you're going to do it if you want to do it is you invite yourself.” For Bravo, the plan succeeded: Do great work, get noticed, get accepted to a festival, make an impression, learn, and return that knowledge to others.
San Martín followed that path as well, soaking up knowledge wherever she found it, collaborating with other talented folks, and gaining acceptance. “The first time that I was in a prestigious festival where I won a big prize, I remember feeling so full of a weird peace,” the To Kill the Beast director says. “There was the weirdest rush inside me that made me feel like suddenly everything in my life was in order. I felt like every sleepless night I had was leading me to that moment.”
She and Bravo are two women who made their way into the film world from the outside, first by themselves and now augmented by a desire to collaborate with each other as well as other artists. They have established successful careers and are becoming models for the next generation. They know firsthand how important having someone to look up to can be. San Martín had this when she was working with Lin-Manuel Miranda. He reminded her “to just feel what [you’re] doing and always connect to the simplest sense of truth, which is in the end, the fuel that should drive us,” she says.
For Bravo, finding examples to emulate took time but she found them, too. “It wasn't until much later in my 20s where I started to see films made by women and see films made by people of color,” she says. “And I can't help but wonder if I had been younger and had those references then, or had been introduced to that work at a younger age, would I have arrived at the idea I could be a director much sooner? Would I have been a 15-year-old like you, Agustina, who knew she wanted to be a filmmaker or even thought that she could be a filmmaker?”
San Martín still remembers the teenager she was, watching and learning, understanding that she could be a filmmaker. “The first time I went backstage, I was never the same after,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, there are people who are doing this. People with fears, ambitions, insecurities, hunger—yet, ultimately, just people. No gods, no idols, but humans. So if they can do it, then I can do it. And if there's no space for me, well, I'll have to make it for myself."
