The Children of the Mountain

The Children of the Mountain grants privileged access to the Uruguayan sculptor Pablo Atchugarry, as he shapes materials from nature. More than 40 years of a dizzying and tireless career position him at the top of the art world. Follow the construction of his monumental museum, serving as a space to showcase his legacy and that of his contemporaries.

In presence of the director Mercedes Sader on March 21, 2024 at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montréal

Word of direction

Art is one of the most important things in my life, and I find in it a way to understand the world. Especially contemporary art, which captures the essence of our time. I consider a work of art not only as the result of creativity, craft and technique but also as something of madness, passion, humor, fear, and a necessary expression of the reality that surrounds us. Artists arouse in me a deep curiosity: what is their creative motor? How do they see the world? What are they trying to communicate to others? I am interested in rescuing these singularities and portraying them in one of the richest forms of communication that exist, which is cinema.

The case of Pablo Atchugarry is particularly captivating to me. He started very young, with minimal resources, in a small and remote country; but his determination led him to learn and grow until he reached the prominent place he occupies today. This story of professional success in such an uncertain field as art can be interesting, but what attracts me the most to tell are the conflicts he faces today. He is facing the construction of a new work, an enormous museum; his social, personal, and promotional agenda is dizzying; he is 65 years old, and time is pressing, physical pain and fatigue make him fear not being able to fulfill his commitments. Amidst all this chaos of life, I’ve tried to portray a characteristic of Pablo that deeply attracts me: his need to transcend. ​“The material dictates,” Ferruccio Musitelli said. For Atchugarry, the material, in his case the stone, contains the work within itself; the sculpture inhabits the stone from the beginning. His task is to remove what is superfluous and bring into the world ​“the children of the mountain.” For Musitelli, filming was letting the subject speak for itself. There is a photograph that Ferruccio took of Pablo in 1979, in Italy. There you can see the young Pablo, hairy, bearded, and disheveled, almost like a caveman, carrying a block of marble in a baby stroller. From that stone would be born his first marble sculpture. Today, 40 years later, there is a material, the life of Pablo Atchugarry, that deserves to be told and shared. My means to do so is cinema because — as Andrei Tarkovsky said — unlike any other art form, it broadens, enriches, and concentrates human’s affective experience, increasing it and making it definitively longer.

- Mercedes Sader