Juan José Campanella in El Secreto de Sus Ojos [The Secret in Their Eyes]: “I haven’t seen it on the big screen for over ten years”

Juan José Campanella, winner of a Spike of Honour at the 66th edition of Seminci, presented on 29th October 2021 the film with which he won the second Oscar for Argentina, El Secreto de Sus Ojos [The Secret in Their Eyes] (2009). Screened in a single session, the film is part of the section dedicated to this year’s guest country.

During the presentation Campanella talked about the change of style that El Secreto de Sus Ojos meant with respect to his previous films: “I had finished making a kind of trilogy: El Mismo Amor, La Misma Lluvia (1999), El Hijo de la Novia (2001) and Luna de Avellaneda (2004) and I felt that a lot had already been said about what was happening to us as the middle class in our country and I found this story about memory.”

Regarding the success that followed the film, two Goya Awards, an Oscar for Best Foreign Film and several international awards, Campanella said that they could never have imagined everything that happened, “never”. The choice of this story was due to the fact that “finding real characters in a gender story tempted me a lot.”

Although he admitted to having recently come across the film on a small television set, it’s been a long time since he’s been in a cinema to revisit it: “I saw it recently, because I had to check how the video was and I was hooked, but I haven’t seen it on the big screen for over ten years.”