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As Sally Potter travels around the world with 'YES'
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This time, I did not go to Argentina

Don’t cry for me, but I was not able to go to the Mar del Plata film festival with YES.
I wanted to, with an aching nostalgia for Buenos Aires, which I would have visited after the festival. I would have danced all night every night for a week, I would have sat in the Confiteria Ideal with its grumpy waiters, I would have wandered the streets hallucinating from lack of sleep and drenched in the high from the body’s own drugs produced by dancing tango.
I would also, no doubt, have been seized by a terrible guilt, the guilt of leaving my writing table, regret about taking focus away from the lure of the new, fear that I would not recover my self-imposed daily discipline, the holy work routine when developing a new film.
So, instead of going to Argentina for ten days, I went to Rome for one.

There I listened to my superb musician friends Katia Labeque and Viktoria Mullova practising Schubert and Ravel for their forthcoming Italian tour, then wandered the streets of Rome, gazing at the buildings, drunk on so much old beauty.
Shortly after crossing the Tiber, flowing green and milky, I chanced across a museum with an exhibition of Roman murders. There I found myself staring at black and white pictures of the great film-director Pasolini, famously homosexual and left-wing, dead in the road, his young killer staring insolently into the camera.

Several good friends of mine recently got married to people of the same gender. The ceremonies were tender and moving, as they made a public commitment to relationships that had already endured for many years. In the weeks that followed we discussed the quiet revolution this change in the law signifies. Perhaps Pasolini would have not been so vulnerable to violent abuse if gay marriage was in the air. If it was even conceivable.

When I got back to London I was delighted to see a message in Spanish on the message board on this site from someone who had been at Mar del Plata. It almost felt like I been there too.


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Confiteria Ideal



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The Tiber



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Pier Paolo Pasolini



Text © Sally Potter. All pictures © Adventure Pictures unless otherwise indicated