Milagros Mumenthaler: a filmmaker crossing currents between Switzerland and Argentina

Milagros Mumenthaler at the latest Vienna International Film Festival (Viennale), in October. © Viennale/Alexander Tuma

Acclaimed at festivals in Toronto, San Sebastian and New York, the latest film by Milagros Mumenthaler heralds the Swiss-Argentinian’s triumphant return to the festival circuit after a nine-year absence. Swissinfo caught up with the director at the Vienna International Film Festival.

It has been 14 years since a Swiss film won the Golden Leopard, the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Though Argentinian by birth and blood, Swiss-Argentinian filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler, who won in 2011 for Back to Stay (Abrir puertas y ventanas), holds both passports: her family moved to Geneva when she was a child, and she lived there into adulthood.

Even beyond that victory in Locarno, Mumenthaler’s journey as a prominent international filmmaker has remained bound up with her European home country, even as she has worked and produced her films in the volatile but famously cinema-rich Latin American state.

This dual nationality means she doesn’t feel totally at home in either country. “Some Argentinian critics have said [my new film] The Currents is more of a European film,” she laughs as she tells Swissinfo when we meet after the film’s premiere at the Viennale in October. “In Argentina I am not 100% Argentinian, and neither do I feel very Swiss, where I haven’t lived for many years. I’m anchored in Buenos Aires by my son.”

After an unusually long hiatus, Mumenthaler’s new work, about an upper-class Argentinian fashion designer whose life is thrown into turmoil after a fateful trip to receive an award in Switzerland, will have its Swiss premiere at the Geneva International Film Festival next month. The director says it was there that she first stepped into the world of cinema, as a 16-year-old volunteer at what was then called Tous Écrans.

Anatomy of a fall 

The Currents owes its inception as a film to one such fateful journey to Switzerland. In 2016, Mumenthaler returned to Locarno with The Idea of a Lake (La idea de un lago). On her way home after the festival, she stopped off in Geneva and began talking with friends and family about an image that had been hounding her: that of a woman who, acting on impulse, jumps from a city bridge into the swirling currents below.

It is that enigmatic imagined image with which The Currents opens. Lina, an Argentinian fashion designer played by Isabel Aimé González-Sola, is in Switzerland to receive an award. In the film’s first moments, she dumps her prize in the trashcan in the hotel room.

From a distance in a single long shot, we see her wander across a bridge on the Rhône, scale the railing in the middle, and drop into the water. The fact that it unfolds in a single long shot, without editing tricks to mask the fall, only makes it a more stark and shocking opening.

“Sometimes you’re full of fear when you go to a balcony,” Mumenthaler says when reminiscing about the origins of that image. “I suppose I had found myself in that moment; I want to jump. Not jumping to die, but to fly. I never came close to doing that, but I know that many people have their fragilities, and in those moments they might mentally disconnect. They’re not indecisive in life [like me], and so maybe they act on that impulse.”

Lina is one such person. After her protagonist crashes into the water, Mumenthaler skips ahead to Lina squelching soggily through the lobby of her hotel wrapped in foil. Her panicked struggle in the river, uncertain escape onto the shore, and overwhelming realisation of the enormity of her brush with oblivion is promptly elided, shown in detail only much later in the film. Mumenthaler seems to want to preserve the oddness of the moment without psychological explication, keeping us off balance as the story begins.

“People are mysterious. I have a son, and even he is a mystery to me,” she says. “Sometimes I feel I know a lot about him, but really, I don’t truly know what he’s thinking. That’s an important part [of making films] for me. I never want to give a why. It’s not interesting to offer a diagnosis of my characters.”

Scene from “The Currents”. © Viennale

A literary element 

When asked about the nine-year interim between her previous film and this new one, Mumenthaler simply emphasises how crucial the writing process is to what she does – a slow labour of composing the story, and then the script – and, after that, how difficult it is to get an independent film made today, especially as an introverted person who gets much of her inspiration from quietly reading novels. 

“Shooting is always a nightmare for me,” she says bluntly, after detailing how much of the joy of filmmaking comes from its two solitary elements, writing and editing. “[During production on an independent film,] you’re forced to run against time; you’re put under intense pressure that’s not helpful.”

More than cinema, it’s literature that fuels her drive to make films. “It’s the act of reading that is most inspirational for what I do,” she says, “whether it’s Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf” – and not Woolf’s The Waves, despite the similarity of the title, she reveals – “or Joyce Carol Oates, Natalia Ginsburg, Samanta Schweblin, María Negroni… These writers inspire what I do.”

The story of a complex inner transformation in an existentially torn, upper-class heroine, with a title that suggests that there is a tempestuous interior world roiling beneath the surface, The Currents perhaps in some obvious senses resembles a novel by Henry James or Edith Wharton. But Mumenthaler is a thoroughly cinematic creature, a visual stylist to her bones. “I love to write, but my scripts are quite literally full of descriptions [of images].” 

As in her other two films, much of The Currents is told without words: smooth panning shots facilitate a flow between sequences, developing a continuous narrative stream without much need for explicit exposition. “I write extensive backstories for my characters – that’s the literary side, maybe – but in the end I’m always looking for ways to translate a script organically into images.”

Liberty advances, cinema retreats 

Swissinfo met Mumenthaler in the afternoon of October 27, 2025. That morning, the world woke up to the news that Javier Milei, Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president, had won a surprise landslide victory in the midterm elections for his party La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Moves Forward), solidifying support for a radical cost-cutting agenda.

“Argentina is a resilient country,” Mumenthaler sighs when the subject inevitably bubbles to the surface. “We endure through great ups and downs as a people. But yes, they are literally killing the industry of cinema. Argentinian filmmakers are already migrating to Spain, Uruguay, Mexico. My friends who work in production have started driving for Uber.”

In December, The Currents will premiere at Fuera de campo in Argentina, a festival organised “from the initiative of a self-organised group of directors, producers, critics, and film workers” and held in parallel to the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, which was previously the country’s premiere film event until it was overtaken by the Milei administration and gutted.

“After [Vienna and Geneva], we’ll take the film there” for The Currents’ national premiere, Mumenthaler says. “It’s good to resist.”

Edited by Virginie Mangin/ds