‘The River Train’ Berlinale Review: A Kid, a City, and the Ghost of Leonardo Favio
Milo dreams of escaping the pressures of family life of becoming a great Malambo dancer by setting out on his own toward the wonders of Buenos Aires.
Lorenzo “Toto” Ferro’s first major screen experience—playing Argentina’s most infamous teen killer, Carlos Robledo Puch, in El ángel back in 2018—left a deep imprint on the then-adolescent actor. Not just because of the film’s impact or the attention his performance received, but because watching El tren fluvial, his debut feature as a director, makes it clear that the DNA of that project—and of its filmmaker, Luis Ortega—runs all through it. Co-directed with Lucas Vignale, a seasoned helmer of Argentine trap videos (especially for Trueno), the film often drifts into the same orbit as the director of Kill the jockey.
Still, The River Train isn’t a copy of Ortega’s cinema so much as a stylistic nod in his direction: similarly lost characters wandering through a city populated by charismatic oddballs and urban fringe-dwellers, glimpses of the secret metropolis that shelters them, flashes of surrealism, and that odd mix of tenderness and eccentricity that defines his work. But the film’s central reference point lies elsewhere—one it shares with Ortega himself: the cinema of Leonardo Favio. More specifically, his unlikely late classic Soñar, soñar.
In a way, The River Train plays like a loose riff on Favio’s 1976 film, released in the immediate aftermath of Argentina’s military coup and a commercial flop at the time. Though poorly received upon its premiere, it’s since become a cult object within Favio’s body of work—some even rank it above more “canonical” titles like El romance del Aniceto y la Francisca or El dependiente. Starring boxing legend Carlos Monzón and Italo-Argentine singer Gianfranco Pagliaro—neither with much acting experience—the film follows a young man from Argentina’s provinces who travels to Buenos Aires hoping to make it as an actor.
That’s essentially El tren fluvial, too. Milo (Milo Barría) is a nine-year-old kid from a provincial town, a gifted malambo dancer pushed relentlessly by his father-coach. At home, he watches Favio’s iconic film on TV and, like Monzón’s character before him, dreams of heading to the capital and making it big. But since he’s too young to go, Milo ends up pulling off a somewhat brutal bit of family deception—another Favio homage, this time to a different film—before running away and hopping on a train.
The rest of the film traces his peculiar misadventures in Buenos Aires. Milo crashes at a hotel in the Chacarita area—right above the Imperio pizzeria recently featured in Los delincuentes, by Rodrigo Moreno—sharing a room with a curious pair of long-term residents: writer Fabián Casas and Pehuén Pedre, who previously worked with Ferro on Simón de la montaña, by Federico Luis, another key influence here. Thanks to a tip from one of them, he lands at a casting call for a theater production, where he meets its young director (Rita Pauls) and stumbles into a new round of adventures.
Narrative propulsion isn’t exactly the film’s strong suit. Milo’s trials lean less toward plot than toward human and urban exploration—a kind of coming-of-age drift for a kid stepping into the world armed with more street smarts than life experience. Ferro and Vignale track his movements through the city with a camera attuned to that familiar but rarely depicted urban B-side: pizzerias, bus stops, train stations—where he encounters a strange conductor played by Diego Puente, the legendary “Polín” from Favio’s Crónica de un niño solo—crowded street corners, and so on. It’s a discovery journey that’s as mesmerizing as it is potentially dangerous.
Music plays a crucial role, too: a prominent, suggestive score shadows Milo’s every move. As in the films of Favio or Ortega, the gaze settles on odd faces, strange encounters, fleeting episodes that shape the boy—rivalries with other child actors, a food heist and ensuing chase, and, most notably, a liberating yet risky break-in sequence that echoes one Ferro himself performed in El ángel.
In that sense, Ferro and Vignale’s debut slots neatly into an aesthetic lineage that stretches from Charlie Chaplin to Luis Buñuel to Pier Paolo Pasolini, before landing in its local touchstones. In every case, it’s a cinema built around the urban wanderings of children confronting the world with equal parts bewilderment and fascination—drawn in by the strange, dazzling spectacle unfolding before them.
