Argentine director Gastón Solnicki is preparing his latest feature film, “The Souffleur,” which he will screen during the Venice Gap Finance Market, which runs from August 30 to September 1.
The film follows Lucius Glantz, an American who has run the same International Hotel in Vienna for 30 years. When he discovers one day that the venerable building is slated for sale and demolition, he embarks on a mission to stop its destruction, pitting him against a cocky Argentinian real estate broker. As their conflict escalates, the hotel's signature soufflé mysteriously stops rising, forcing Glantz to confront the possibility of the end of everything he holds dear.
“The Souffleur” is directed by Solnicki from a screenplay he co-wrote with Julia Nyman, and produced by Gabriel Kranzlbinder and Eugenio Fernandez Abril for Vienna-based Little Magnet Films and Solnicki’s Argentine production company Filmy Wiktora.
The director says diverse The idea for the film came from a “strange and failed experience” in a Buenos Aires restaurant, when “soufflé was forced on me in a very sad way”.
It was like a betrayal for Solnicki, who studied cooking as a young man and was “trained in this French military tradition.” Describing the “agony” of preparing the famous baked dish, he says: “It’s not just something where you follow a recipe and it happens. It’s really an act of love and… an act of faith.”
Using elements of surrealism and comedy influenced by the works of Luis Buñuel, the film “plays with the idea of a building that is about to become [demolished]And sweets are no longer available [able to rise]“There are also wind feelings,” says Solnicki, “and all the myths about the wind and the god.” [breathing] “It brings life to the world. It brings endless layers of significance.”
Solinki's first feature film, “Kixacalo,” won an award at its premiere in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival before screening in Toronto and New York. The film, which follows a group of teenage girls in Argentina coming of age who are uncertain about their future, has received critical acclaim. diverseDirector Scott Tobias praised the film as a “joyful experimental narrative” that showcased the director's “extraordinary talent”.
His latest film, “A Little Package of Love,” is a cinematic tribute to Vienna, chronicling daily life in the Austrian capital on the cusp of a citywide smoking ban. The film premiered in the Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival in 2022.
In recent years, due to “strange circumstances in my life,” the Argentine has increasingly found himself working in Vienna, a city that feels culturally familiar—his family roots are in Central and Eastern Europe—while also holding significance as what he describes as “the cradle of modern music.”
“My films are ultimately based on real soundscapes,” he says, noting that his first film was inspired by Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle. “This idea of absorbing music, expressions of places, soundscapes… which is often beyond the reach of traditional filmmaking – there’s a world of nuance both in sound, but also in performance, working with non-professional actors, which I find cinema often neglects in some way or drowns out with its noise.”
“The Souffleur” will reunite Solnicki with Portuguese director of photography Rui Bocas, a frequent collaborator of Cannes award-winning director Miguel Gomes (“Grand Tour”), and will also use the stunning architecture of the Austrian capital as its backdrop.
“Vienna is a great location, but there is no art director, no set designer, no production manager. I am very interested in working in a new realistic way with real locations,” says Solnicki.
“I still have memories of my early days of spying on my family and making first-person, suspenseful, curious films. Once you get hooked on that documentary aspect, it’s very hard to let go of some of the tricks.”
