Amalia Ulman

I started my journey very young, at 16. It might sound a bit naive since I was still in high school and planning to study science. That was the plan, but then a digital camera showed up at home, and I started exploring photography. I already had an online presence at the time, though I later decided to delete everything. Through the Internet, I made friends in Barcelona and Madrid; I was only 16, while they were around 26 and already artists. Things started to click — I began exhibiting, and that’s when I realised it would be a mistake to continue with science, which I found challenging. 

Yes, I was in Gijón, but with my little savings, I would go to Barcelona to visit my artist friends. That’s where it all started, very self-taught, so I decided to study art. Being from Asturias, I would have to move to study anyway, either to Madrid or Barcelona, and since there was a cheap EasyJet flight from Gijón to London, I thought, well, if I have to go, I’ll go straight to London.

No, I didn’t learn anything, and maybe that was my first mistake. I shouldn’t have studied Fine Arts. Unfortunately, I knew very little and didn’t have many people to guide me or help me; I didn’t have mentors. I always liked literature and film more, but especially with film, I didn’t have female references or people from my social class. For me, studying film seemed impossible; I didn’t know anyone. I’d look at the credits of movies, see all the people involved, and think, this is something other people do, not me, always working alone in my room. So, I decided to study Fine Arts because I took photos and so on. But my issue as an artist is that I don’t have a traditional studio practice, and my art practice is very narrative based, which is frowned upon in the Fine Arts world. I always felt out of place. Honestly, I didn’t enjoy art school at all; I learned more by meeting other artists, not at school.

Not really. If I had studied something else, honestly, it would have been better.

I only lived in Argentina for the first year of my life.

Definitely Argentina.

Yes, I moved to New York in 2020.

I love Spain. The issue is that Spain hasn’t loved me back. I love going to Spain — I used to go all the time. My first movie was made in Spain, and in fact, my next movie, the third one, will also be shot in Spain. I adore Spain, but it’s not reciprocal. In Argentina, I feel very welcome, and despite the few times I’ve been, I have many filmmaker friends, lots of support, and a connection that, unfortunately, I don’t have in Spain.

Anyway, I don’t have a love-hate relationship with Spain. Like I said, I shot in Gijón, my first movie premiered in 2021, “El Planeta”, out of love for my city, and I think that’s clear in the movie. It’s a portrait of Gijón.

And my third film is also, let’s say, a portrait of Spain. I really like Spanish cinema, and I love going to Spain. The issue is that I don’t have support. “El Planeta” is on a Spanish streaming platform, but no one knows because we didn’t have advertising, communication, or distribution. Whereas in the United States, it was in theatres for eight weeks, it was on Delta Airlines flights for months, and it’s on HBO, which is a mainstream company. The film got much more promotion there than in Spain, even though it’s about Spain and was filmed there, and I find that strange. I appreciate the success in the United States because I live here, but yes, the Spain thing does not feel right.

But I tried, you know? I want to make it clear that I did try. While I was living in London, I would go back to Asturias every three months with the intention of having a career in Spain.

My neighbourhood, Cimadevilla in Gijón. I remember being very bored in my childhood. So much boredom! I would never go back to my childhood. Except for my neighbourhood, which is a very unique place. Everyone who visits Gijón has been to Cimadevilla because it’s where people go out to party; it’s a very famous spot. I remember it because it’s so special. For example, the other day, I was watching Agnès Varda’s first film, “La Pointe Courte”, from 1956, which is set in a fishing village. The curious thing is that this film transported me to my neighbourhood, where I lived in the 1990s. Cimadevilla in the nineties was like a Fellini film from the sixties: the clothes, the yelling, everything. I feel lucky to have grown up in a place that seemed frozen in time. My experience was like growing up in an old Europe. Cimadevilla is a mythical place, full of history, layer upon layer of memory. I remember running through the streets as a child, among ruins, cats, women selling fish, barefoot kids shouting. It’s a Europe that no longer exists, and I’m not even that old. There, I had an almost timeless experience, and I feel fortunate for that and have so much love for Cimadevilla, which, unfortunately, isn’t what it used to be.

My parents are Gen X hipsters. I grew up surrounded by hipsters, subcultures, skaters, and the like. I didn’t have a traditional childhood, but I don’t see that as a problem; I missed out on many conventional teachings, but I absorbed everything from that environment.

In 2014, I started publishing the performance that would later become “Excellences & Perfections”. For that, I created an online persona that initially blended the real with the fictional. In fact, you could say it was my first film. That was a dark time: I was in a lot of pain from my accident but pretended to be fine while staying busy with many activities. Being part of an industry that believes in momentum, I kept going, taking prescribed OxyContin to ignore the pain. After a trip to New York to present a piece at the Swiss Institute, I continued posting “Excellences & Perfections” from a religious retreat I went to for a fresh start without meds. It always amused me that people thought I was a sugar baby in luxury hotels when, in reality, I was cleaning the cabins’ toilets in the woods.

This work was essentially a response to the success of  “Excellences & Perfections” where I was playing a character, a sexy character, and it was a very aesthetic piece. As a result, people expected me to keep working in that vein, doing sexy things. But those who knew me were well aware that neither my personal style nor anything in my life resembled that character; still, because it looked beautiful, people kept asking for more of the same. So, almost as an act of rebellion, I prepared another performance where the character wasn’t glamorous but worked in an office, exploring material aspirations and privilege. It was during the Trump vs. Hillary elections, a politically charged time. So, I created a character that, in the U.S., would be considered cringe based on extremists from both sides of the political spectrum I found online, drawing inspiration from material by both Trump and Hillary supporters. Another aspect that unsettled people was the pregnancy. As you see, it was an intentional mix of themes opposing those in “Excellences & Perfections”. The pregnancy part caused a lot of controversy. It was interesting because I was set to receive considerable funding for a second performance. But once I presented the script and explained what would happen, they denied the budget because of the pregnancy theme. The irony is that, at the same time, funds were granted to another artist who had faked his own death. It’s interesting to see which themes are acceptable and how far you can go. You can fake a death, but not a pregnancy? It’s quite a taboo topic, especially in the U.S.

No, it wasn’t even that; the comment was something like, “Some woman who couldn’t have kids might be offended.” It was a topic they preferred to avoid, out of fear. It was strange because the pregnancy itself wasn’t the issue, but the fear of addressing the topic. The pregnancy was seen as highly taboo by the men in power who were supposed to grant me the funds, but no woman had taken offense.

Yes, exactly, something like that, protecting women from a potential offense.

I was used to working alone, photographing myself, directing myself, because even in “Excellences & Perfections”, I had a script, although it was less specific. As you know, I would photograph myself in different situations and post it on Instagram. The thing is, as my artistic practice grew, I increasingly needed more people on my team — not only to help me build installations but also in other areas. It reached a point where I had a solo exhibition every month; it was crazy. So, I started working with more and more people until, eventually, the difference between an indie film and the amount of people I was working with for my artistic practice wasn’t that great anymore. That’s why I decided to make the film. And while we’re on it, I’d like to mention again that “El Planeta” is still available in Spain, and people can watch it on Filmin and Apple TV, so I hope that when this interview is published, more people will get to see it.

There’s a lot of running back and forth between the camera and the scene, for example. That’s how I work in photography: I run in front of the camera to check how it looks, pose again, and so on. And directing myself? Well, it’s similar; we do the scene, I check how it turned out, and we repeat. But I have to thank my assistant director, Carmen Roca Igual, because I trust her a lot. In “El Planeta”, I’d sometimes turn to her and rely on her judgment that if she thought the scene was good, then it was good for me.

I decided to shoot in black and white because, aware of the budgetary limitations, I wanted to make something beautiful. I don’t draw, but I know how to do everything else, so when I make films, I’m the producer, costume designer, set designer, editor, but above all, I’m very involved in the photography because it’s a medium I’ve used a lot. Asturias has poor light for filming and photography, so I knew that if we filmed in colour, colour correction would be a nightmare. By filming in black and white, we could control the look of the film from the beginning. It was a decision made from the start, and it also determined the costumes we would use. Everything was planned to work without colour. And yes, it was mainly because Asturias is grey.

Yes, I wrote it myself.

Everything I have said in my interviews has always been true. The only fiction has been “Excellences & Perfections”, which was conceived for Instagram as a tool, as a medium, as a showcase to present the piece, just like I now use the cinematic medium. That work was taken down from my profile. Everything you’ve read now is true.

Yes, all the treatments and surgeries were done there. But I would prefer not to talk too much about this because it is something very traumatic and serious for me, and unfortunately, I have been left with a permanent disability. Sometimes I use a cane and a wheelchair, although I’m currently training my dog to help me.

I think this film has less to do with my personal life, although it still has references. We filmed it in Argentina, the country where I was born, and my grandmother appears in the film, although she’s not a main character. But also, it does relate to appearances. I consider “El Planeta” stylistically and thematically to be a very Argentinian film, even though it was filmed in Gijón. However, “Magic Farm” is a much more Spanish film in terms of aesthetics; it takes inspiration from 1990s Spanish cinema, such as “Airbag” (Juanma Bajo Ulloa, 1997) and “El milagro de P. Tinto” (Javier Fesser, 1998), with that very colourful Spanish camp aesthetic. It also reminds me a bit of “¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall!” (Luis García Berlanga, 1953); it is in that sense that the film relates to appearances. The movie is about a documentary crew, as if it were from Vice News. Some hipsters from New York travel to Argentina to make a documentary searching for a trend that no longer exists, so they decide to fake it along with the Argentines, the people from the village, who, on the other hand, have no problem lying, pretending, and participating in the deception since they are being paid and want to be nice to the Americans. It’s somewhat similar to what happens in “¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall!”, where there’s also a predisposition towards the Americans. The villagers say, “This is what the Americans want, so let’s do it, no problem.”
And continuing with social themes, they definitely exist because there are social differences between the village people and the Americans who come to shoot the documentary. There are also social differences within the group of Americans; we have characters like the one portrayed by Chloë Sevigny, who is the presenter of the programme they are filming, plus the other characters who work behind the scenes and probably don’t have health insurance in the United States and not much money either. On the other hand, many interpersonal relationships arise between the Argentines and the Americans.

One of my favourite directors is Ernst Lubitsch. He was a significant reference for “El Planeta”, for example. I also incorporated references from the Nouvelle Vague because I took influences from European cinema as well. For “Magic Farm”, a great reference has been Robert Altman, especially due to the structure of the movie, which is an ensemble film with many actors and multiple interconnected stories.

Yes, making a film about vice is deeply related to my parents; it has a lot to do with them.

Yes, more or less, a tribute and or critique.

I wrote the character with Chloë in mind, and we have many mutual friends, so I simply met with her and shared the script. With Simon, my producers already had contact, and he was very interested in making the film. In fact, the most complicated character to cast was Alex Wolff because it was a complex role. Let’s say Alex’s character has a relationship with a girl, and when we did the casting in Argentina, it turned out that this girl was a pretty young actress, which complicated the character quite a bit because most of the actors for Alex’s role were much older. We didn’t want to add the layer of complexity to the relationship that comes from that age difference. We didn’t want a relationship between someone 50 and a 19-year-old girl. Luckily, Alex is also young, so it was easy casting him because, even though his character was a troublemaker, a fuckboy, the age is similar, so the chemistry was very natural.

I financed “El Planeta” myself up to the post-production stage because the Government of Spain didn’t give me money, and neither did Asturias. I tried a lot, but they wouldn’t give it to me. So, I moved the project forward by myself. I managed to get some small funding from London, then I was commissioned a workshop, so I gathered the money and paid my team, which was only five people, through the audiovisual agreement in Spain. The good thing is that since I had good material, some American producers joined the project for the editing and finalisation phase of the film to send it to festivals like Sundance and others. Some of those who had helped me finish “El Planeta”, like Spacemaker Productions, also joined the “Magic Farm” project, and then MUBI, which produced the film. Additionally, in Argentina, we worked with Rei Pictures, who are the producers of “Zama” by Lucrecia Martel. So yes, in this case, “Magic Farm” is a more standard production in terms of funding.

One month in Argentina.

Definitely in 2025.

Yes, I am still in the art world. In fact, recently I also curated a group exhibition titled “MiCasa” in an apartment on the Upper West Side, which was still being renovated and that I have started to transform into my studio. This year I left all my galleries. I made this decision because I am not interested in commercial art, and I really don’t want to return to an art fair in my life. But that doesn’t mean I will stop making art because that will always be part of me; I am an artist and I will die an artist. 

Well, water is a hobby for me. I got certified and went to the Doemens Academy in Munich, so technically I am a water sommelier. I started posting videos just for fun. It’s between films that I can dedicate myself to doing something different. I also learned to ride horses and train dogs; I mentioned I am training my dog to be a service dog. Water had been an interest of mine for a long time because I am very sensitive to flavours, but somehow it became something more serious and especially this year, I was asked to curate waters for several shows. In the end, what started as a hobby turned into ten exhibitions.

I do everything by myself; I don’t have a team or a studio. I work with people on a project-by-project basis.

Right now, I am focusing on writing short stories and tales, and I am also working on the script for my third movie, I am almost in pre-production phase.