“Death Has No Master”, interview with director Jorge Thielen Armand

Presented as a world premiere in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, “Death Has No Master” marks a new return to Venezuela for director Jorge Thielen Armand. The film centres on Caro, a woman who travels to Venezuela to sell her late father’s cacao plantation and finds the family mansion occupied by its former staff.

Jorge Thielen Armand explains that the film was shot in Venezuela in 2025, with production ending in September of that year. At the time, the country’s political climate was already shaping the atmosphere around the shoot. “There were already the American aircraft boats on the shores,” says Jorge Thielen Armand. “That was creating a climate of uncertainty, fear.”

The director underlines that later events are not directly part of the film, but he acknowledges that audiences may now read the work through Venezuela’s more recent political tensions. For him, that connection is less a matter of topical reference than of atmosphere: a pervasive instability that enters the behaviour of authorities, institutions and private citizens.

The house as a living character

The family house is not only a setting in “Death Has No Master”. It functions as a character, a repository of memory and a physical embodiment of decay. Jorge Thielen Armand says this idea runs through all his films, where the house, or the absence of one, becomes a central dramatic force.

For this film, he imagined the walls themselves as unstable. “I always envisioned seeing the walls moving,” says Jorge Thielen Armand. That sensation is created not only through images, but also through sound. The director used material from a 1970s magnetic tape belonging to his family, digitising it and spreading those sounds across the film. The result is a sonic texture that suggests the characters’ psychology and the secret life of the house itself.

Building a visual language with Luis Armando Arteaga

The film’s visual identity was developed with cinematographer Luis Armando Arteaga, whom Jorge Thielen Armand describes as more than a director of photography. Their collaboration was not based only on technical decisions, but on conversations about life, cinema and literature. Luis Armando Arteaga was involved at every stage of the process, including the script and subtitles.

The director says the film’s style emerged while they were making it. There were initial ideas, including lens choices and a decision to embrace visual noise, but the cinematography remained open to discovery. The main rule was to shoot largely on a tripod or rails, with exceptions for selected handheld scenes. “The film was guiding us how to shoot it,” says Jorge Thielen Armand, describing a process that combined formal control with a desire for freedom.

Casting Asia Argento as Caro

The choice of Asia Argento as Caro came first from intuition, not familiarity. Jorge Thielen Armand had not seen her work extensively when her name was suggested, but a photograph was enough to trigger a response. Something in her eyes, he says, convinced him that she could carry the role.

What interested him was not only her acting experience but the history she would bring with her. Asia Argento’s biography, her relationship to cinema, her public life and her personal baggage gave Caro dimensions that could not be written in conventional script terms. “I was especially interested in who she is as a person,” says Jorge Thielen Armand.

Once Asia Argento joined the project, the character changed. The original Caro had been imagined as more delicate, while Asia Argento brought a sharper force to the film. “Asia brought a certain toughness and a certain rock and roll vibe,” says the director. That energy helped him recognise the film’s gothic potential, something he connects to a harsher, almost Goya-like darkness.

A film born from a recurring dream

“Death Has No Master” originated in part from a recurring dream of an abandoned house or building. For Jorge Thielen Armand, the dream did not provide a simple plot. Instead, it opened a question: what fear was he trying to excavate? The film became a way to enter that fear, rather than explain it.

“I don’t choose the films I make,” says Jorge Thielen Armand. “They choose me.” His return to Venezuela is described as both a curse and a blessing, a compulsion that gives the work its urgency. The journey of making the film, like Caro’s, becomes a descent into a place of pleasure, vice, decay, and catharsis.

Classism, race and the violence of inheritance

Class injustice is central to the film, and Jorge Thielen Armand situates it within Venezuela’s racial and social history. He connects contemporary classism to the caste system imposed during Spanish colonial rule, officially abolished after independence but still present, in his words, in the collective soul of the country.

“Death Has No Master” examines how inherited hierarchies continue to shape relationships, property and violence. For the director, the film is about “the murderous quality of classism” and how inequality can turn people against one another. The conflict around the house and the plantation is therefore not only personal but also historical.

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