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In 'Problemista' Julio Torres spins immigration stress into satire
Julio Torres attends a screening of Problemista in New York on Feb. 27.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
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Julio Torres attends a screening of Problemista in New York on Feb. 27.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
Comic, actor and filmmaker Julio Torres came to the U.S. from El Salvador in his early 20s — and he says he is personally familiar with “all the Catch-22s of the immigration system.”
Take, for instance, needing to prove that he was a working artist in order to obtain an artist visa — but not being able to earn money as an artist without the visa.
“Originally, I came to the U.S. with a student visa, and then I had a work visa,” Torres explains. “Then I had to go from a work visa to an artist visa, because under the work visa, I wasn’t able to earn money as a stand-up comedian or writer or anything creative, because that’s not what the work visa is for.”
As an aspiring writer for TV and film, Torres found that the New York City open-mic stand-up scene was a great way to establish himself in the creative world. Along the way, he says, “I fell in love with the world I accidentally wandered into, and I made a lot of friends in that world. And then the stand-up became a calling card for what I do now.”
Torres draws directly from his own experience in his new satirical film Problemista, which he wrote, directed and stars in. He plays Alejandro, an immigrant whose visa is running out, and who needs a job and someone to sponsor him. Tilda Swinton co-stars as a difficult art critic and potential sponsor who wants Alejandro to be her personal assistant — but who has her own complicated life.
“This movie deals with the problem of immigration, but I think of it as a very silly, happy and joyful movie,” he says. “It’s almost like the bureaucracy becomes this bouncy castle that the characters just get to play and laugh about.”
Torres’ previous work includes stand-up specials for HBO and Comedy Central, short films for SNL and Los Espookys, a Spanish language comedy series for HBO which he wrote and acted in.
Interview highlights
On what “Problemista” means to him
The road to finding a title for the movie was long. It had many titles during many different points, and none of them felt completely right. And then at one point, we were toying with the idea of calling it “Problema,” which just literally means “Problem.” But I just felt dread calling this movie “problem,” because it just felt so dreary. And that’s not the tone of the movie at all. So then I was trying to find something a little bit more playful, and I was thinking of what you would call someone in an artistic movement in Spanish, like a surrealist is a “surrealista.” And then I thought, well, then maybe someone who creates art from problems is a “problemista.” So I just sort of made it up. It almost sounds like the kind of thing that you’d make up in slang in El Salvador, sort of in the way that, you know, you hear about people being “fashionistas” or “Maxxinistas.” It’s like, oh, a problemista is someone who is attracted to problems or thrives within problems.
Julio Torres as Alejandro and Tilda Swinton as Elizabeth in Problemista.
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Julio Torres as Alejandro and Tilda Swinton as Elizabeth in Problemista.
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On the Tilda Swinton character, Elizabeth, who is very difficult — and Torres’ love of difficult people
She’s an amalgamation of so many people that I met. I think that it’s almost like the artist rite of passage, in New York City at least, to wind up being the assistant to so many people who are just so flustered by the fact that they haven’t figured out so much. And I was a short-term assistant for so many people. …
I am very attracted to difficult people. I don’t see difficult people as nightmares to escape. I’m really drawn to them like a moth to a flame. And then there are more than a few that I came to really, really, really empathize with and appreciate. And I think that Tilda’s character is rooted in that. …
I honestly don’t think that I want to change anyone so that they fit in the world. I think that sometimes I want to change the world so that it can accommodate the janky edges of a person.
On feeling like an outsider in El Salvador because of his sexuality and atheism
I just felt like I couldn’t really, like, emotionally connect to my peers and my surroundings in a way that was very alienating. Like, I was so disinterested in watching a game of soccer. And that felt like something that connected so many of the boys around me, or playing a sport. … I just have always felt a little alien. And then coming to New York and being legally labeled as an “alien.” … Because that is the term they use. You have an ID and it says “alien.” It just sort of solidified this point of view, and I think that I will forever be attracted to people who don’t quite fit in, and realizing that those people are not just foreigners.
On his intense focus on getting his visa to pursue creative life
Living a creative life and doing the kind of work that I want to do was the driving force. And then my personal life has always fallen by the wayside. … In the year or so that inspired this movie, Problemista, I was so laser-focused on getting a visa, and I wasn’t really interested in friendships or dating or anything, because I felt like I needed to put my humanity on hold to pursue this thing. In fact, during the time when I was trying to get a work visa, I made up a rule for myself where I would only wear black and white because I felt like color was too distracting, and I felt like I hadn’t earned color, and I felt like I could wear colors, maybe, once I got a visa and I had more breathing room to think about other things.
On immigration now
I came to the U.S. in 2009. And no, to be honest, my experience is radically different [from] the crisis we’re all seeing in the news. The crisis is very present in New York City right now. But the thing about me and the character that I play in this movie is that it wasn’t really the story of someone escaping for survival. It’s the story of someone just escaping or leaving for a greater ambition, to find himself.
Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in Obsession.
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Focus Features
Two big horror films, Obsession and Backrooms, just smashed all box office expectations. So much of their success has been driven by Gen Z, which is now the biggest moviegoing demographic. But what makes a movie a Gen Z movie? Today we’re bringing you an episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Host Brittany Luse talks about this trend with Sam Adams and Reanna Cruz.
If you want to hear more about these movies, check out these episodes:
In ‘Obsession,’ love hurts. It really, really, really hurts.
‘Backrooms’ brings YouTube horror to the big screen
Zendaya brings ‘The Drama,’ we bring the spoilers
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I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
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Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
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