The Message of Everyday Life
Argentine director Iván Fund presents The Message, the winner of the Silver Bear at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival. Written by Fund and Martín Felipe Castagnet, the film premiered at the festival before receiving this prestigious award.
The feature film, selected for the Europe–Latin America Co-Production Forum at the 2023 San Sebastián Film Festival, follows a nine-year-old girl with the ability to communicate with animals. As she embarks on a journey through rural Argentina, we accompany her alongside her two adult companions, who manage the business and establish contact with clients.
Describing a film like The Message without falling into the rhetoric of its synopsis and genre is no easy task. We could say it is a road movie rooted in magical realism (a style so masterfully employed in Latin American literature), yet it transcends that genre and its references to deliver an immersive, crystal-clear central idea: the preservation of innocence through the eyes of a child.
Although the film seemingly shifts perspectives throughout the narrative, the story is always presented through the protagonist’s gaze. Her innocence and her commitment to balancing the need to provide comfort to those who seek it while accompanying her companions through the grief that defines their journey sustain the emotional structure of the film.
In an interview I conducted with Fund during the festival, he mentioned that the feeling they aimed to evoke was melancholy—and without a doubt, this is an accurate description of the film’s lingering impact. It is enveloped in a sweet melancholy, as if we were inside the girl’s memories of a journey where she tried to hold together this makeshift family, each member caring for the other with whatever little they had. There is something profoundly pure in this effort, in this chosen family that protects itself throughout the journey.
The film does not attempt to over-explain the relationships between its characters or the themes it explores. Instead, it leaves space for the audience to project their own narratives onto them. As the director aptly put it, the art of storytelling lies in ensuring that the film remains coherent regardless of how the viewer chooses to fill in those gaps—thus making them a silent accomplice to the story.
The use of Always on My Mind, the iconic Pet Shop Boys track (previously employed hypnotically in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers), serves as the final nail in the coffin of melancholy that The Message constructs around us. A coffin that paralyzes, leaving the viewer immobilized by the emotions it conjures. However, thanks to the film’s delicate approach, that coffin becomes warm, like sunlight filtering through a window on a winter morning, gradually illuminating every corner of the room. In the same way, the protagonist slowly and empathetically acknowledges her surroundings and reality.
Interestingly, the song’s inclusion in the film was a complete accident: it played on the radio during filming and, by a happy coincidence, ended up becoming part of the feature. Thus, the film stands as a deeply sensitive testimony, one that lingers within every viewer who had the pleasure of experiencing it at the festival. Its well-deserved Silver Bear at the 2025 Berlinale is proof of that.
