San Francisco-based Magnum photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti has spent over 25 years chronicling the lives of cousins Guille and Belinda. These are two mischievous, free-spirited, highly imaginative girls who grew up together in challenging circumstances on a farm in a rural province of Buenos Aires.
She has exhibited pictures, and published a book – The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams – about them. Now, she has made a feature documentary following the duo as they play and dance in the fields, dress up, swim in the river, talk about their hopes for the future and muse on the meaning of life as they grow ever older.
The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer (sold by Autlook) has its premiere in the Filmmakers of the Present Competition in Locarno. Mubi will handle its release in North America and the UK.
Sanguinetti credits the “tenacity” of her producer Julia Solomonoff in getting the project green lit. “She’s a film director and professor. She knew my work because some of my photographs inspired the visual images in a film of hers. At one point, she called me in 2016, I can’t remember why, and said hey, wouldn’t you be interested in filming the girls?”
Sanguinetti instantly replied that she already had 70 hours of moving image material of Guille and Belinda. “I had begun filming them because I didn’t feel that photographs were enough,” she remembers. “I just thought, oh, I can’t get those conversations or those movements on still film.”
The first footage dates from 1998/1999 when one of the girls was 9 and the other was 10, She had been using an 8mm Sony camera which she describes as being like a toy and which gives the material a home movie quality.
“In the beginning, there wasn’t an intention to make a film. There was just a need to record something I thought was really important.”
Guille and Belinda had begun to seem to her “bigger than life.” She was determined to capture the many tough but magical moments of their lives on the farm. “To me, they were just the centre of the universe – and I think that comes through in the work too. If you stop and pay attention to the smallest things, you can make them the centre of the world.”
For the first couple of years, Sanguinetti was both filming and photographing the girls. At that stage, she simply wanted to have a record of “the changes going on in front of my eyes.”
Sanguinetti was born in New York but grew up in Argentina. Her family had a farm where she would spend her summers. When she was an adult, she continued to go back there. That is how she first got to know the girls’ parents.
“It was such an organic process. I didn’t have to ask for permission,” she says. “The parents trusted me. I had been photographing and living in the area for a long time. Ever since I was little, I felt close to that landscape. It’s a very flat horizon. It sometimes seems that nothing is going on. Most people just drive through it but I always saw so much happening.”
If you opened a tuft of grass, she remembers, you would inevitably find an insect. The farm workers and their animals lived in a state of mutual dependency – but sometimes the animals were killed.
On a formal level, the flatness meant that she could frame everything that happened outdoors against the sky.
“When I grew up and was doing photography, I knew I wanted to go back there and explore,” she says. One of her first major works, On the Sixth Day, examined farm life from the point of view of the animals. “While I was doing that work, I met the girls’ grandmother and that is how I met them.”
The grandmother, who died in 2018, was an intriguing character in her own right. She kept a diary, using language in blunt, eccentric but highly poetic fashion. “They’d all say, oh Juana, she never stops talking. She doesn’t make sense. But I thought she did.”
The director estimates she shot around 90 hours of footage of Guille and Belinda over the years. After she moved to New York in 2002, she would still return to Argentina two or three times a year to be with the girls.
In 2024, Guille and Belinda, now women in their early 30s, accompanied the photographer to an exhibition of her work at the Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris in which they featured prominently. “I knew as soon as they invited me to the show that Guille and Beli had to come with me. They came and it was just a wonderful trip because they had never been outside of Argentina.”
This Paris interlude features prominently in the film. Guille and Beli are seen at familiar landmarks, take part in fashion shoots and are photographed posing in front of images of themselves.
Although they remain near neighbours, the girls now live “very different lives.” Family and work responsibilities have come between them and their relationship is less intense than in childhood days. Nonetheless, being together in Paris enabled them to reconnect. “With the three of us, it felt a little bit like when we were very young. It was a very joyous trip and they also got closer again.”
Despite her photography background, Sanguinetti found it liberating to work with moving images. “With a still camera, I always need to control things much more. With film, I can just let go of that control and let things flow – and be surprised a little more.”
She was often working on the hoof. Sometimes, she would be taking pictures but would be so excited by the conversation between the girls that she would run off to get her other camera so she could film them ‘live.’
The photographs themselves were conceived in an “organic” way, without extensive pre-planning.
And, no, there were never tensions between the director and her subjects. “The way the work was born was so natural and so full of trust that when I started editing, I never felt like I was a documentarian going into somebody’s life. They were part of my life – and believe me, they called the shots!”
Sanguinetti insists that neither girl was intimidated by her presence in the slightest. If they wanted her to turn off the camera, they’d simply tell her. She showed them the footage and both always accepted it.
“I love them and most of my work comes out of love. I don’t feel an ethical conflict because I really feel that they know what is going on. They have always been in control – and they are actually really excited about the movie coming out!”
Having made her first feature documentary, Sanguinetti is now contemplating another. She has footage of her grandfather who worked as a general physician in Brooklyn from the late 1930s onwards. “I filmed him a lot when I was young until he died. That is something I am interested in going back and working on because he was an example of physicians that don’t exist anymore. Everybody loved him in the neighbourhood, he did house calls. If you walked one block with him, people would stop him and say he gave birth to them and if he shook your hand, he would take your pulse. He wouldn’t charge people who didn’t have money.”
That project is at a very early stage. In the meantime, she has plenty of photography assignments. As a Magnum photographer, she is a member of one of the world’s most exclusive and prestigious photography co-operatives. “What I appreciate most about Magnum is the relationships I made. I made friendships and learned a lot. It’s the sense of community it gives you,” she reflects on an organisation which now links her to legendary figures like Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
