zoe hochbaum comes from rolling “Cape Polonio”, a film she wrote with Gustavo Gersberg and in which she stars, along with Sofía Gala and Carmen Maura, directed by Nicolás Gil Lavedra. She says casually that her hairstyle is out of control due to the humidity of Buenos Aires, that years ago she submitted to the flat iron and straightening, until she understood that you have to let it be. And let be. The open curls become a corkscrew to enter deep questions: mandates, deconstructions, the “revolution of the daughters” and its pending.
News: Are there still many mandates for those of your generation?
Zoë Hochbaum: If many. I have friends who continue to fight hard with their hair and sometimes they don’t go into the sea because of their hair and I tell them: “Girls, no, they’re beating us”. There are a lot of things that we have managed to let go and understand, and the level of consciousness that we handle today and how we bond does not compare to how we did it when we were 16 years old, not only because of age, but because of the context. Today a 16-year-old girl is much more aware than I was when I was 16. However, sometimes I go to parties that are not the environment in which I move and I see a dynamic that I do not understand and that continues to happen. Because one thinks that everything is much better, that feminism has achieved everything, but I run out of my bubble and see what I thought no longer existed, like competition between women or men on the prowl, like we are at this pivotal moment.
He says that society demands blacks and whites all the time, labels, and that what anguishes and worries him the most about this claim of a single answer is that we are actually missing out on the greys. “It seems a cliché, but in this “be you”, what we are really saying is “be you with all that path that involves going from white to black and from black to white”. And put down the contradictions, and one day you will have the divine curls and another, no.
News: When did you start banking these internal processes?
Hochbaum: It always happened to me that not only did I perceive myself as a super confident, secure and commanding girl, but my outside also saw me like that. But there was a very pivotal moment that was in 2015 with the first strong movement in Argentina of Ni una Menos. Feminism was almost like a religious conversion. That’s when I realized that all that confidence was for the outside, that I didn’t have it internally, because I kept submitting myself and suffering for a lot of things, like not encouraging myself to put on a bikini in front of my brother’s friends or to wet myself. hair so that it is not ugly, a lot of things that one says are superficial, are for the outside; but for the inside there is a whole layer of insecurities and social mandates and how we women who sucked it when we were little have to be. At that moment I think something was uncovered and I began to work a lot together with my friends. The most valuable thing was putting together a support network of female friends, that union made me much stronger inside.
News: Growth implies delineating your own identity beyond your family of origin. Was it difficult for you or did you do it all at once?
Hochbaum: It was not difficult for me because luckily I have a beautiful family context and parents who have always supported me on my way, and continue to do so because I like to think that my career is a search path, that it is dynamic. So, I had a mattress of saying “I can be wrong and nobody is going to punish me.” On the contrary, I remember my old man that if he gave me a bad grade in elementary school, he would give me a chocolate for my effort.
News: Is he very self-demanding?
Hochbaum: Forget it, the fight is with myself, because I always lived a very adult life. In my head everything was resolved, since I was 7 years old, I want to be an actress, as something to have everything resolved. Very structured, obsessive vegan, kind of obsessing a lot.
News: There are labels: feminist, vegan, determined… they also build identity.
Hochbaum: Exactly and you go out into the world and you realize that you are really vulnerable and you say: “Oh, how scary the gray, how scary to hesitate!”, then I have to show myself to the world as if I know everything, almost like a shell: “ I am this, I do this, I can handle this”. And the truth is that since the beginning of 2022, I am in a process in which I realize that it is much more interesting to say “I don’t know”. My theater teacher, Marcelo Savignone, was the first teacher I asked a question to and he told me: “You know I don’t know?” And he seemed so valuable to me. Imagine, he had to tell me an authority for me to say: “Oh, sure, we all may not know!”. That calls me much more, the grays.
News: Did you have educational experiences in other countries, was training another obsession?
Hochbaum: A lot, it’s having the tools. And understand that not all countries are the same.
News: How does that play into your structured facet?
Hochbaum: It loosens me up and gets me into the game for real. Savignone always says that you have to play seriously. Playing is believing it, inhabiting, trusting, understanding that there are a thousand ways of doing things, expectation versus reality is not unique, there are as many expectations and realities as there are people in the world.
News: What are your expectations today?
Hochbaum: The truth is that it is nice that we have started with this from the hair, of being you, of accepting ourselves, because I am in that process of being as faithful to a version of myself as possible, understanding that this can change according to the environments and jobs, in that process of understanding that there are things that will touch my heart and things that won’t, but are just as good. In the film’s script, there were dialogues where Sofía Gala’s character said to mine: “Be you”. There are times when one is afraid of being oneself, due to one’s own wounds, but I feel that I am in a moment in which whatever I do, I like the project more or less, I want to do it from Zoe, without pretending anything more that what I am
News: It seems that she put herself in a very demanding place of being a generational reference, a spokesperson, that is heavy.
Hochbaum: Yes bad! Above all, it happened to me with the columns that I write for Infobae. For me it is such a responsibility to have that voice that I always like to bring other voices in my columns, regardless of my opinion, let’s use this space to make ourselves heard. But if, one always tries to be the best version of oneself but in reality for me the learning is why the best, is the one that I can with what I have and also what I want, which version do I want. Do I always have to give 100 percent of myself? No, not at home, not with a partner, not with my friends, not at work. It’s like exercise: if you train the same muscle group every day, you’ll injure yourself.
News: You are the screenwriter of the film, does writing lower things to the text that take on relief later?
Hochbaum: One hundred percent, that’s what I was talking about with the other scriptwriter, I told him: “Dude, there’s something that started to happen when we were acting it out.” Because acting, when you do it from the heart, is living, it is feeling, it is inhabiting, it is moving, so when that is happening and the characters come to life outside of your ideas, the three-dimensionality is such that the paper almost vanishes. And that’s really strong for a screenwriter but, at the same time, it’s the best thing that can happen to you.
News: What did you want to convey with “Cabo Polonio”?
Hochbaum: The film is a journey, a truth is unleashed and with that truth a question is unleashed and with that question, the search for an answer. It was very crazy because during the shooting I was realizing why I had written certain things. At some point, the film is a search for identity and there is something about that search for identity that we all the time think is far away, that it is outside, that it is like unattainable and actually it is in the closest things, in your dog, in your plant, in your skin, as if there is something of identity that is not just the arrival, it is everything, it is what you are now, it is what you went through, what you want to be and what you no longer want to be .
News: What do you wan’t to be?
Hochbaum: I want to be me, above all things. and I want that I to be dynamic, I like the multifaceted, the interdisciplinary. My search as a person and as a professional, which is the same at some point, is the truth. As an actress I want to tell the truth. And as a person, the same. And as a writer, the same. And asking ourselves is an excellent engine of life, not thinking that everything is as they told us, questioning things.
