My experience as a filmmaker begins with a manifesto entitled "For a Nationalist, Realist and Popular Cinema" and culminates in another manifesto, entitled "For a Cosmic Cinema, Raving and Lumpen." The breadth of the trajectory is a product of expansion rather than of negation.

Photo from El Alquimista Democrático

This latest manifesto, a poem published in conjunction with the screening at the Venice film festival of my latest film, Org, is proof of the fact that I am more than ever a "foreign element" in the country where I have lived now for fifteen years. Consistent with one of the attitudes that has shaped my entire life and work, my years in Italy have been marked by the conscious decision not to become a part of Italian life. However painful it may be, I cannot disguise my own condition; I cannot cease to be an uprooted Latin American trying to build a life in exile. Naturally, I take part in the life around me -I attend demonstrations, I participate in debates -but always with the awareness that I am a "marginal" being in the Italian context, and that my "marginalization" has been a conscious choice.

The film I have just completed, Org, is also a "marginal" film. Slowly, like a snail that leaves behind a silvery trail, I've assembled the film as I've gone about living my daily life, until the two have become indistinguishable to me. The film is a poem, a fantasy, a Roschach test for the spectator, more visceral than rational, aimed less at the conscious mind than at the subconscious.

Although it grows out of my filmmaking experiences in Latin America, I don't believe that Org belongs with what I call my "Latin American cycle"; but, if pressed, I have to concede that in a sense the film participates in and even anticipates the difficulties and contradictions that countless Latin American filmmakers have been compelled to face, given the tragic historical events that have plagued Latin American political life since the Bolivian coup of 1971 and the overthrow of the Popular Unity government in Chile in 1973.

From: Burton, Julianne. Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversations with Filmmakers. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, (1986): 2-11. [Used with permission]