COLUMN: Art in its Own Terms #3, "Get on Amalia Ulman's Bus or It'll Leave Without You"

Dmitry Samarov on Amalia Ulman's first two movies, El Planeta (2021) and Magic Farm (2025)

Only two films in, Amalia Ulman may have already found her very own wavelength. It’s not that what she’s doing is so unique—there are clear influences and precedents—but the pacing and humor are specific enough to set her work apart. I read in a recent interview that she was a clown’s apprentice in her teens. As the star of her first film, El Planeta (2021), and an ensemble player in her newest, Magic Farm (2025), Ulman brings a pantomimic vibe to her performances. No pratfalls, but some of her gestures and reactions are Buster Keaton mixed with Betty Boop. There’s a knowing Who me? gleam in her eye. Her films move at a herky-jerky trot with non-sequitur sidesteps but there’s a rage simmering underneath. You laugh and laugh as the poison trickles down your throat.

While both her movies are comedies, each has dead-serious underpinnings. In El Planeta, a mother and daughter—played by Ulman and her mother, Alejandra—struggle to maintain a quotidian existence by pulling minor scams and committing petty theft. Left without an income after the death of the husband/father, the pair can’t come to terms with the change in their fortune and continue to live as if they are still well off. They go shopping and eat gourmet meals as their electricity is being cut. The disconnect between how they see themselves and how they are is stark, but by playing it for laughs Ulman undercuts the harshness of that reality.

In Magic Farm, the director widens the scope both of what she wants to say and by the voices that say it. A mismatched crew of gonzo journalists sets out to make a documentary about a mysterious singer in rural Argentina who performs in a bunny suit, but end up involving themselves with an odd cast of characters in a moribund little village. The slapstick and gallows humor is upped a thousand-fold, and casting Chloë Sevigny and Alex Wolff as the two most oblivious members of the crew blurs the line between farce and reality TV. Watching it, I was reminded at times of Radu Jude’s vicious and mordant Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (2023) in the nimble way both films capture the fragmented existence of young people in the current media landscape. But where Jude delivers his points with a sledgehammer, Ulman prefers more delicate devices. It’s possible to enjoy her movie as a goofy, romantic confection, even as razor blades hide throughout the sponge cake and fondant.

There’s a crop-duster sickening the population, but when the dumb Americans ask whether something should be done about it, they get sheepish stoicism in response. The villagers are used to be being abused by corporations, by foreign powers, and by their own government. A crew of silly foreigners is a welcome diversion from their day-to-day. What keeps the movie from being a didactic lecture on the evils of capitalism and commerce is the specificity and contradictions of Ulman’s characters.

Camila del Campo’s Manchi would be defined by her port-wine stained skin were she cast in a standard message movie, but here her condition is both a brand of honor and a referendum on those who judge her. She develops a crush on hapless gofer Jeff (Wolff), even as everything out of his mouth is racist, cloyingly needy, or otherwise awful. You like him because Manchi and Edna (Sevigny) do. When he shows a photo of some graffiti he snapped in town, Manchi translates, “If he makes you laugh, suck his dick.” Of course he has no idea because he doesn’t know any Spanish. He just thinks it looks cool—a thing to post to Insta.

In one of countless quotable moments in Magic Farm, when Manchi learns Jeff’s name, she says, “Like Jeff Besos (makes kissing sounds)…it’s a joke.” Jeff doesn’t get it but we do. In another memorable scene, Ulman’s Elena asks the receptionist about whether the crop-duster they’d been buzzed by earlier is dangerous. The man sighs and admits it is. Many in the village have developed cancer as a likely consequence of the glysophates left in their air, but he tempers this by comforting her, “Let’s not dwell on sad stuff.”

Everyone here is coerced into and humbled by the need to perform for social media, whether they’re spoiled Brooklynites or impoverished Argentine townsfolk. A couple films that popped in my head as I rewatched Magic Farm were Matteo Garrone’s Reality (2012) and Sophia Coppola Bling Ring (2013). Both present the perils of being sucked into online or televised vortices with horrible results. Ulman doesn’t make her hapless tourist-journos pay quite as high a price for being taken in by the quest for novelty and fame, but their utter lack of respect or awareness of the circumstances of others’ lives is an endemic symptom of the way mediated relationships with the outside world are making many of us less empathetic and certainly stupider.

Ulman made a name in the art world a decade ago with internet performances skewering Instagram beauty culture and exploring the undo strains capitalism puts on the disabled. The art world is not known for empathy or care toward its own. Ulman said in a recent interview she recently quit the art world, though not art. She has found the movie industry more welcoming, if for no other reason than its inherently collaborative nature necessitating that people help one another. I don’t know whether the movie industry has any future, but if it does it will be with young artists like Ulman showing the way.

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