Artistic Differences Invites María Aparicio

In this month’s episode of Artistic Differences, hosts Cíntia Gil and Christopher Allen speak with Argentine filmmaker Maria Aparicio about her stunning third feature, Undefined Things, winner of the Cinema Tropical Award for Best Latin American Film.

A delicate meditation on cinema, memory, and mourning, the film follows Eva, a film editor in Córdoba. Eva is working with her assistant on a documentary about people living with blindness, while also grappling with the recent death of Juan, a filmmaker friend whose films she once edited. Her days are divided between sorting through fragments of Juan’s unfinished images and the more immediate task of shaping a project with her assistant, blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary and asking what it means to carry the work of others forward.

Blindness, both literal and metaphorical, emerges as a central thread. Eva’s encounters with the blind people she meets reshape how the film listens, looks, and attends to the everyday. The vivid conversations they have form a counterpoint to Eva’s solitary editing, suggesting another way of perceiving the world. “I sometimes think that cinema is very connected to faith,” Aparicio reflects, “like believing in something.” In Undefined Things, blindness is not a limit, but an opening—a reminder that there are forms of experience and knowledge that exceed what is visible.

Aparicio turns to Borges, whose writings on blindness open a way of thinking about cinema not as pure vision, but as a medium of transformation and relation. She reflects on the practical conditions of making films in Argentina — from the support of public film funds to the constant challenges of sustaining independent cinema. She also tells us about the more intimate forces that shape her work: friendship, teaching, collaboration, and the necessity of love and play. Taken all together, she threads a vision of cinema as both fragile and inexhaustible, a space where blindness, doubt, and wonder can coexist, and where images continue to create bonds between people.Big thanks to our incredible team:

Editor: Alison Rodgers

Mixer: Pedro Castro 

Music: Andres Simoes 

Production Support: Tara Aliya Kesavan, A.S.M Kobayashi 

This is a production of UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art. ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES is co-curated and co-organized by Cíntia Gil, Christopher Allen & Jenny Miller.