The 20th century is insistently knocking at our door. The crises of its institutions dominate the news, its tragedies repeating themselves daily as farce. The most-awarded and discussed films of 2025 — One Battle After Another, Sinners, Marty Supreme, The Secret Agent — all try to answer this unwelcome visitor. Santiago Sein’s All You Need to Make A Movie Is A Gun does so even more literally and substantively than these films, and with a comparable sense of epic scale.
The film’s heart is a found footage documentary based on newly discovered reels shot by a group of politically active students and teachers at the National University of Córdoba (Argentina) in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The material includes narrative and documentary shorts in unfinished form, diaristic audio logs, and recordings of demonstrations; this was the time when resurgent Peronists battled with the military regime and Peron himself returned from exile. The source material ends with Peron’s death and the advent of the military junta, which was assumed to have found and destroyed all of these reels.
Sein structures his material into three parts. The central and longest one is composed of the historical film, which is mostly silent, and “narrated” by separate tapes made by the group’s sound recordist, who recorded much of what was filmed (that material mostly missing), but also, when alone, tapes describing the group and their activities. These diary tapes are a blessing which allow this central section to be coherent and immersive using only the found materials, with no intrusions from the present day. They describe the filmmakers as students, their development as revolutionary activists, and ultimately their disappearances by the state or their plans to flee as the military dictatorship comes to power and radicals are named to the police or paramilitary organizations. The film reels shown along with the tapes are edited to match them relatively seamlessly.
These artists consciously placed themselves in the tradition of Third Cinema, conceptualizing the act of recording and projecting as a weapon in the class struggle. One of them quotes Godard’s famous comment that all you need to make a weapon is a gun and a girl, and suggests that you just need the gun — i.e. the camera. This history and the ideas discussed in the group have tremendous interest and relevance in their own right 50 years later, for activists and artists and anyone concerned with the conjunction of the two. Sein does a good job of letting the material speak for itself. But his film does more than that, bracketing what could almost be a standalone film with two other segments that contextualize and historicize. The first, which opens the film, discusses the history of the reels and tapes that compose it, and how All You Need To Make A Movie Is A Gun itself came to be made. The last, which ends it, tracks down the surviving members of the original group, showing them the footage to gather their reactions and reflections and to trace the history of its other members (who escaped and who did not; not all survived or made it out of Argentina).
These segments are less successful. They provide some valuable context, but they are less clearly edited and bogged down by repeated B-roll footage of film cans and equipment. More to the point, they make the whole film feel rather conventionally documentarian in contrast to the radical aesthetic and political aims of its subjects. Perhaps the filmmakers wanted to respect the very precious materials they discovered without imposing any more risky creative choices onto them, but it feels like a missed opportunity that an otherwise essential and standout work is content to observe the practices of past revolutionary artists without asking what, in formal terms, it would look like to renew their practice in our own time.
Published as part of IFFR 2026 — Dispatch 5.
Comments are closed.