If her 2020 video essay Sordid Scandal is to be believed, Amalia Ulman once had a Dazed article used against her in court. After Ulman and her mother were given their own flat in Gijón, the Tate-commissioned video explains, Ulman’s father argued to the judge that his daughter was famously a liar. In her memory of the trial, which she admits is “incomplete” and based on her mother’s account, Ulman imagines her father bringing up a “stupid clickbait article” from 2018 with a headline reading: “How this 2014 Instagram hoax predicted the way we now use social media”. The publication’s name is hidden in Sordid Scandal, but it was a Dazed write-up of Ulman’s online project Excellences & Perfections.
When I bring up the Dazed reference to Ulman, she laughs it off. “I’ve been very mistreated by the press,” says the 35-year-old Argentine-Spanish filmmaker, smiling over a video call from New York. “I don’t think it was Dazed specifically, but it was many others at the time accusing me of being a scammer – even though I always make it clear I work with fiction.” Is that why Ulman’s second feature, Magic Farm, is a media satire about reporters misinterpreting artists? “It isn’t necessarily only journalism. I’m interested in people’s relationships to one another, and their misunderstandings when it’s coming from different backgrounds.”
Written and directed by Ulman, Magic Farm depicts a ramshackle gang of American documentarians who land in Argentina only to realise they’ve got the wrong San Cristóbal and the wrong country. Unable to interview the cult musician they were chasing, the crew – the actors comprise Chloë Sevigny, Alex Wolff, Joe Apollonio, Simon Rex, and Ulman herself – invite local residents like Popa (Valeria Lois) to invent an eye-catching trend. It’s a blatant parody of Vice News, and Ulman has even confirmed it in previous interviews.
Today, though, Ulman claims it’s not really about Vice, and more about “Spanish hipsters that were, in the early internet, fascinated by Latin American musicians from very rural areas”. Still, she admits her fascination with how Vice News chased virality and shaped journalism over the years. “The only stories we hear from the Global South are very sad and very serious. Nobody seems to talk about the lighter stuff. But if you only talk about the lighter stuff, it’s like: you’re ignoring all the horrible stuff that’s happening.”
To prove Ulman’s point, the American characters are so self-obsessed that they miss the environmental scandal surrounding them regarding pollution and poisoned water. When announcing the film’s Sundance premiere on Instagram, Ulman used the #Monsanto hashtag. “It’s beyond politics,” she says. “Things like climate change affect everyone, whether you’re left, right, rich, poor. What’s at the core of the movie is how these people connect to one another despite the control of corporations. People in the village are like, ‘Our lives are fucked because of the water.’ But that doesn’t stop humans from connecting or falling in love.”
Ulman was born in Argentina but grew up in Spain before studying art in London and finding online fame in America as a visual artist. Her 2014 project Excellence & Projections, which was later presented at the Tate Modern, involved an Instagram persona that, for four months, used cosmetic surgery to alter her body. In another art show, Privilege, she used Instagram to fake a pregnancy. With a background in provocation, Ulman keeps Magic Farm visually and rhythmically unpredictable. Some sequences are even shot with GoPro cameras attached to dogs.
I’m a white Latina. A lot of people forget where I’m from, and they say outrageously racist things around me. It’s always been revelatory what people say behind closed doors
While Magic Farm and its integration of TikTok is clearly the work of an internet-savvy director, Ulman tells me she was more inspired by the 1953 comedy ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! and “random silent movies” like Napoleon. “In early cinema, the editing is different and weird because they’re trying things out,” she says. “There were no rules yet. For me, it’s about bridging that gap, and trying to make cinema as exciting as it used to be, instead of something that’s rigid.”
Once again blurring fact and fiction, Ulman’s debut feature was 2021’s El Planeta, a black-and-white drama starring Ulman and her real-life mother as a daughter and mother being evicted from their home in Spain. (Robert Pattinson was such a fan, his production company supported Magic Farm.) For Magic Farm, Ulman wanted to explore the role of narratives in Argentina, explaining, “Argentina lived through the Perón era with Evita, who’s a mythical figure that nobody questions. Then we had a dictatorship that was murderous and bloody, and controlled the media. My parents’ generation were fed so much propaganda. I grew up listening to certain stories, and then learning that most of them are not true.”
On Magic Farm, Ulman plays the only Spanish-speaking member of the American crew, and based the Americans on people she knows. However, Ulman remarks that she identifies more with Manchi, a local woman played by Camila del Campo. “I have a lot of experience hosting Americans,” says the director. “I know both sides.” She hears what’s being uttered in private? “Absolutely, especially because I’m a white Latina. A lot of people forget where I’m from, and they say outrageously racist things around me. It’s always been revelatory what people say behind closed doors. It’s very upsetting.”
Ulman has been especially pleased with the film’s warm response in Argentina, and from Latin Americans when it screened in LA. “I’m a strange case in Argentinian cinema,” she says. “With very few exceptions, everyone who makes cinema in Argentina is from Buenos Aires, and from the one per cent. They’re all very wealthy from rich families, and I’m not. I’m trying to show the Argentina I knew from visiting with my family. I’m showing a different side of Buenos Aires.”
For Ulman’s third film, she will shoot an adaptation of her short story The German Teacher in Spain. There’s also the theatrical release of Magic Farm, which has understandably divided audiences with its unusual, unruly pacing, highly saturated colour palette, and off-kilter humour. Whereas the New York Times deemed it a “droll delight”, the Guardian labelled it a “flat comedy”. Ulman presumably welcomes the strong responses?
“Nick, there’s nothing I can do about people’s reactions!” she says. “The only thing I can do is try to make the best film I could possibly make, and personally like it. It happened with El Planeta, too. I received criticism for El Planeta about the depiction of eviction by people who have never lost their homes, but people who grew up in a car with their mother reached out to me with nice messages. What means a lot is when people who are connected to the background, like it. It’s beautiful seeing kids from regular backgrounds daring to go to film school because of El Planeta, and a lot of them have disabilities as well.”
A lot of my work is about: ‘Why do you feel uncomfortable looking at this?’ And how to change that, especially because of how different cultures can see the same thing as beautiful or ugly
In 2013, Ulman survived a Greyhound bus crash that permanently shattered both her legs. In a 2024 Substack post, she wrote, “My whole life revolves around avoiding feeling disabled.” Noticeably, a comic scene-stealer in Magic Farm is Mateo (Mateo Vaquer Ruiz de los Llanos), a local performer whose progeria is never directly commented upon by the characters. “It’s all about showing disability in a different light,” says Ulman. “Actors like Mateo are usually used in horror films. Sometimes disabilities in films are just depicted as sad and depressing, without showing the actors doing anything else. They just show they’re disabled.”
She continues, “It’s important to give the space for somebody like Mateo to show their talents, to show how witty they are. I’ve always been interested in training the eye. A lot of my work is about: ‘Why do you feel uncomfortable looking at this?’ And how to change that, especially because of how different cultures can see the same thing as beautiful or ugly. When you’re dealing with somebody with disabilities or scars or anything – it’s maybe shocking the first time around, but then you get used to it.” She adds, “A lot of people with disabilities really liked Magic Farm. That’s all I need.”
Magic Farm is out in UK cinemas on May 16