Carrero, a film by new Argentine directors Fiona Lena Brown and Germán Basso, starts as a slice of life in Buenos Aires, more specifically in the inner-city ghetto of La Plata. Then, it grows as a captivating story that could apply to anyone, anywhere. For, even though it deals with inner-city disfranchised people, it gets to the core of human existence as a quest for spontaneity.

Ale (Rodrigo Varela) discovers that working a horse cart collecting, and sometimes stealing, recyclables is a lot more satisfying than going to high school. The cart belongs to his friend Rengo (Carlos Castillo) and his older brother, Astilla (Braian Gonzalez), who is away in prison.

Ale enjoys a moment of freedom as the faithful horse drags their cargo through the dirt roads of the ghetto, picking up odd stuff, old materials, and… Maca (Aldana Jara), the neighborhood girl he has been flirting with. But when Astilla returns, he reclaims his horse and his hegemony in the barrio. A sense of impending conflict stymies Ale’s brightening spirit.

Yet, the “carro” has done its job: it has planted a seed in Ale’s mind. When Maca asks him what his plans for the future are, he says he would like to be a “carrero” for the rest of his life. It’s good to be free, to not have anyone telling you what to do, to be your own master.

“I think everyone wants to have a job [in which] they have freedom – it’s a universal issue,” Brown said to the HFPA in an interview at the BAFICI headquarters in Buenos Aires. “This is something we tried with the movie: to talk about teenagers who start to work, to explore their identity, and what they want to do with their lives.”

She continued: “Being a carrero is not just about picking up trash, it’s also something you enjoy, something you can have fun with”. Showing a colorful clay gnome amidst the rubble accumulated in the cart represented just that – the child-like joy of discovering something unexpected and beautiful. “We wanted this treasure to have a bit of a personality,” Basso pointed out in the same interview; “we needed to break reality a little”. Brown interjects: “You know why? Reality is all the time shown with a lot of suffering, a lot of pain. Why? Reality can be fun and weird!”

Despite Carrero being their directorial debut, it feels unusually mature both as storytelling and as a piece of cinematic art. Initially, Basso set out to make a documentary about the problems of education in marginalized communities. This turned out to be an impossibility. “It was very difficult to tell the stories of minors – [talk about] their lives and their problems,” he recounted.

Brown explained that, in Argentina, there have been a lot of movies in recent years about marginal communities, which are “always associated with drugs, violence, death,” and which follow certain stereotypes. These directors wanted to do something different: “We belong to a post-modern generation,” offered Basso. “We don’t see black and white, good or bad. We find beauty in unexpected places. We try to avoid Manichaeism… We try to film reality, not judge it”.

It isn’t that Carrero shies away from showing the brutal conditions of inner-city life. For example, there are several scenes showing the characters using drugs. “We are playing with that,” countered Brown. “When you see [these scenes], you feel that something bad is going to happen. But it never does.”

Basso and Brown worked with the La Plata community for four years, either filming or rehearsing scenes, and they got to know that milieu closely. “[They] have dreams, interests in life … they want to be able to choose, to play, to enjoy what they are doing, to feel free, and we tried to bring these things to the movie,” Brown said. “Drugs and violence exist in the neighborhood but that is not all there is,” Basso chimed in.

All the roles in the film are played by non-actors, whom the filmmakers met on location. Because the couple spent years working in the neighborhood, the participants got acting training. “If you want to shoot guerilla-style nowadays, you can do it,” attested Basso. In the beginning, it was just the two directors, maybe one more guy from the neighborhood holding the microphone. But then, the La Plata film school got interested and students served as crew members.

There’s another reason why the Carrero cast feels so incredibly real and why Rodrigo Varela (who plays Ale) has the potential of becoming a professional actor: “We really tried to capture the essence of the person, to understand the personality of the actor and explore it,” confided Brown. “We made the actors think like the characters,” Basso added. That is, they ingeniously and successfully matched the personalities of the actors to the personalities of the characters.

They described Varela, their lead, as “playdough,” a malleable person who was able to follow directions easily. “You cannot do that in two weeks or one month,” Brown said. “You really need to know the actors, [to be able] to play with the locations, the characters, the situations. That’s why I think the movie feels really honest.”

Here’s Basso’s case for this kind of immersive filmmaking: “We are portraying a world. These people know their world. That’s the honesty of the film. That is the key element. You have to understand and to adapt to the world. That takes time, and [it requires] a lot of listening. You have to observe, not just what is happening but also how it’s talked about. Sometimes we’d ask ‘How do you say this idea?’ And they would come back to us and say ‘But this idea is wrong; we’d say something different!’”

Not surprisingly, the movie crew never felt vulnerable to acts of theft or physical aggression. They made the film with the locals and the locals cooperated, precisely because the filmmakers had fostered relationships with them based on mutual respect and appreciation. In fact, the actors acted as a shield of protection for them. “Not a single cable was stolen or lost,” affirmed Basso. “The movie is a consequence of our friendship”.

In the end of the film, tragedy is averted by a thought spoken out loud by the protagonist. After having a taste of independence, Ale is able to think differently. Instead of resorting to violence in order to resolve disputes, could they all create a win-win scenario? Instead of dividing themselves into warring gangs, could they join forces for their common good?

“If in the end someone [were to be] killed, everything would go up in the air,” Brown said. “Ale just wants to be a horse-cart owner, you know, nothing spectacular. It’s as simple as that.” Wanting to become a carrero is simple alright. But a story about finding the possibility of autonomy in the midst of destitution could not be more spectacular.