RIDM 2025: The World Upside Down | Interview with Agostina Di Luciano & Leon Schwitter

A few months after a world premiere this spring at Visions du Réel, The World Upside Down (El Mundo Al Revés) is continuing its festival run with a stop in Quebec for the 28th edition of the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM). Screened in the International Competition, this hybrid feature filmed in rural Argentina—blending documentary and fictional elements—is the first collaboration between filmmakers Agostina Di Luciano and Leon Schwitter. In the film, two main narrative threads emerge, each centered on characters with seemingly ordinary lives: a grandfather and his young grandson, and two housekeepers hard at work. Their trajectories gradually take on a fantastical turn, merging reality with magical realism, which unfolds as a way of re-enchanting the everyday while paying tribute to the oral tradition of local myths and legends.

What brought the pair to Argentina for this project was Agostina herself, who grew up in Buenos Aires. “Agostina always told me about this village where there are a lot of myths and legends, but also where people live so differently that it feels like time has stood still,” explains her partner and co-director, Leon Schwitter. Agostina Di Luciano adds: “People always believe in this magic as a kind of hope. And this is really part of Argentinian culture.”

More broadly, their artistic approach is rooted in the backdrop of an Argentina shaken by political and economic crises for decades. “Sometimes, and especially now, the reality in Argentina feels like the world upside down,” he says, adding that the idea for the film’s title was present from the very beginning. “The world is kind of on its head, and so many things need to be turned on their head to make this world actually sit right.”

The decision to merge documentary—”to show people not seen so much on screen,” says Leon Schwitter—and fiction quickly became obvious, allowing them to bring Argentina’s myths and legends to life and infuse a touch of the fantastic into the film’s documentary foundation. This was particularly compelling for Leon Schwitter: “Coming from Switzerland, it’s something we really don’t have—or maybe not anymore.”

The filmmakers shared this ambition wholeheartedly. “I think for us, it was really the interest in visualizing that in cinema,” Schwitter explains. “So we thought, let’s make a film about all those stories that are alive in this region. And we really wanted to visualize some of those stories.” He acknowledges the possibilities unlocked by this approach: “The fiction creates more of a subversive counter-reality.”

Artistically, the directors searched for the magical and the fantastical within the real to support their vision. In both image and sound, they create an additional layer of meaning—one that evokes a more spiritual space while remaining rooted in reality.

Agostina Di Luciano distills their creative approach succinctly: “We wanted to create an experience that is a dream, that doesn’t just stay in reality.” Leon Schwitter added: “The intent was to make a film that shows reality and real people, but also takes those stories and turns them into a dreamy experience.”

This led them to experiment extensively. “We were really trying—even with the music or with the sound—to play a little with this reality, and see how some sounds might connect you to spirituality,” Agostina explains.

The film uses a striking musical punctuation built around pan flute, evoking human depth and a breath that carries the viewer into a spiritual realm. And the sound design, especially in supporting the film’s fantastical elements, greatly enriches the overall experience.

The filmmakers asked themselves unusual questions, such as: “How does a light sound?” Agostina recalls, then elaborates: “That’s a very interesting thing cinema—or the language of cinema—allows. To invent how something might sound even if it doesn’t exist, or maybe does exist but we don’t know how to listen to it.”

“I think we had a lot of fun playing around in this film,” admits Leon Schwitter. “We had a kind of documentary approach that was mostly observational. And then we had something completely different—there was no written dialogue, but we had ideas for certain scenes, or we observed and reenacted what we saw.”

To carry out a shoot where the filmmakers inject so many ideas and constantly shift between real and fictional modes, building a relationship of trust with the protagonists—who are, of course, non-actors—was essential. Although they were members of Agostina’s family, the process still required time. The filmmakers lived in the village for two months, initially without cameras, to build a shared trust — a foundation that later allowed them to film with greater freedom and ask more of everyone on set.

“I think in this moment you kind of trust each other as humans,” Agostina Di Luciano says. “When this trust is there, you can start to play a bit—maybe ask for something.”

This atmosphere allowed the directors to work intimately with their characters and construct a film that evolved day by day. “We never really knew if it would work,” confesses Schwitter. They began editing the film parallel to shooting to ensure they were heading in the right direction.

The filmmakers searched as they filmed, collaborated with their protagonists, and tested their ideas against the real—no small feat for a first collaboration. “We are two intense people,” Agostina Di Luciano warns. “Two intense people and an intense project can be a challenge.”

Still, they could rely on strong and complementary artistic backgrounds: Agostina Di Luciano comes from Theater Pedagogy, “a kind of social work mixed with theater,” while Switzerland-born Leon Schwitter comes from fiction; his debut feature Retreat (2022) notably won the First Look Award at the Locarno Film Festival.

It was their open-mindedness and humility that enabled them to complete the project and enrich each other’s ideas. “The more I do filmmaking, the more I know that I don’t know,” Schwitter says. “And the most important thing in co-direction, I think, is trust.” Yet he recognizes that one is rarely prepared or skilled to work collectively: “It’s something very necessary, but very challenging, because our society doesn’t teach us how to work this way.”

Their guiding principle around the camera was simple: “We tried to create a space with a very flat hierarchy,” he explains—both between themselves and with their protagonists.

Humility remained essential as they tested ideas while staying attentive to reality. “For example, we wanted to make a scene where Omar—the grandfather—tells a story to his grandson, Noah. But Noah had heard this story 7,000 times already, and it wasn’t interesting because he got distracted and started playing with his animals. So we thought, maybe that’s the story!” The documentary approach demands such humility. “Reality is mostly better—far more complex, far more beautiful,” says Schwitter.

This openness and flexibility were at the heart of their creative process, made possible by their small crew. “It’s always important to stay open in filmmaking. And I think that’s the cool thing about working so lightweight.” Schwitter adds a glimpse into the shoot: “It was just the two of us with a camera and a sound recorder making this film. And then you’re super spontaneous.”

Still, Agostina Di Luciano was careful not to exploit the generosity of the protagonists, who opened their lives to their experimental process. She made it clear to them that they should say so whenever the filming felt too heavy or intrusive. As she sums up: “If you don’t have this very open communication, it can turn into something very weird.”

Documentary ethics also required the filmmakers to consider how their characters were represented on screen. Schwitter is unequivocal about portraying characters who sometimes face difficult circumstances: “I think what’s important is not to victimize them. We could have made the film about two of the female protagonists and portrayed them simply as systemic victims—shown their class struggle. You need to acknowledge that reality, unfortunately: our world has class differences, and this needs to be shown.” He continues: “This cannot be neglected, but we wanted to show them as our friends, to show them primarily as two women and not as victims of class violence.” For him, this ethical stance is a political act: “In the end, it maybe makes people empathize more nowadays, because I can only absorb so much brutality in the world before needing to shield myself. They are also humans with so many different strengths.”

A mix of freshness, inventiveness, and a fluid dialogue between reality and dream, all wrapped in meticulous, spellbinding craftsmanship — that’s what awaits audiences in The World Upside Down.

The 28th edition of Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) is running on November 20-30, 2025 in Montreal, Canada.