Crazy Days in Argentina

When Argentina elected Javier Milei as president, it chose a man whose biographer saw only one possible title for his book: El Loco. The Madman. The nickname followed Milei from his days as a footballer through a brief career as a rock musician, and it has stuck. Both his opponents and his supporters use it. He has learned, apparently, to weaponise it.

Director Pertti Pesonen's 2024 documentary travels to Argentina six months into Milei's presidency to take stock of what his radical libertarian programme has produced. The president views the state as an enemy, has dismissed tens of thousands of officials, abolished half the country's ministries, and gutted funding for social programmes. The results are visible on the streets. When Milei took office, roughly 40 percent of Argentines lived below the poverty line. Within months, that figure had climbed to around 60 percent.

Pesonen builds his portrait through sharp, specific voices: a biographer who studied Milei's psychology, a television comedian who finds the president simultaneously irresistible material and impossible to parody. The film holds the eccentric persona and its very real consequences in the same frame, refusing to let one obscure the other.

A Finnish production from Yle, available worldwide for TV and VOD.