Argentina has been in the news quite a bit this week with the recent passing of Pope Francis, who was born in Buenos Aires. It’s also the stomping ground of rising artist and filmmaker Amalia Ulman, whose follow-up to her acclaimed movie El Planeta is set primarily in Argentina despite being an English-language film. Magic Farm offers a uniquely charming cinematic experience. Its infectiously absurd comedic vibes may bring to mind Napoleon Dynamite, but the actual subject matter grazes a pertinent health crisis looming in South America and other parts of the world. In effect, writer-director-star Ulman creates an exciting end result that is at once funny and thought-provoking while we follow along with a bumbling American film crew trying to make TV gold in a rural Argentine town — often to disastrous results.
MovieWeb recently caught up with Ulman to learn more about her latest indie comedy film, which is certain to resonate with many cinephiles. “I think this film is serious. I think comedy is serious. I don’t like when comedy is not taken seriously. It’s a disservice to people’s intelligence,” Ulman told MovieWeb. “This is something that I’ve always struggled with, you know, like with El Planeta. I was also accused of, like, dealing with a subject matter like that with comedy.” Ulman continued:
“But precisely in El Planeta, that’s a subject matter that I personally dealt with, and I know that when tragedy and crisis like that happens, it happens over time. Like, it’s not just a constant. It’s something that is looming in the background. And there’s moments of levity, and there’s humor, and there’s people that have a way to survive these things. So, in essence, I’m trying to be realistic with how it actually is in situations like that. These tragedies happen, but also, people fall in love, can get horny. There’s, like, all this other stuff, honestly. I think that’s my style of filmmaking, and I don’t think it’ll ever change.”
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Chloë Sevigny, Alex Wolff, Joe Apollonio, Camila del Campo, and Simon Rex star in ‘Magic Farm,’ in theaters April 25, 2025.
Magic Farm
3
/5
April 25, 2025
93 Minutes
Heidi Ewing
Heidi Ewing
Ulman’s latest film features a wonderful little ensemble led by a never-better Chloë Sevigny (Monsters), who also joined our interview with the director. Sevigny nails her role as the TV crew’s head honcho, perpetually stressed about her dysfunctional team in trying to put a documentary of sorts together about the small Argentine town they mistakenly wandered into. Given Sevigny’s vast experience working on TV and film sets over the years, she opened up to us about how she was able to slip into her Magic Farm role that much easily:
“I’m… very alpha. I’m also, like, very practical, and in my friend group, I feel like I’m the most sane of everyone. So I’m used to navigating people with eccentricities and people that look at the world in different ways, and sometimes it’s fun to check out and navigate the world through their eyes. But now, I always have to kind of steer the ship, you know, to get us wherever we’re going next.”
From MUBI, Magic Farm will be released in theaters starting Friday, April 25, 2025. Check out the trailer below:
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