Led by a special screening slot for the acclaimed Patricio Guzman documentary “My Imaginary Country,” as well as directors’ Fortnights “1976” and a new short film by 2018 Cinéfondation Award winner Diego Cespedes at Critics’ Week, Chile visits the largest attendance of any Latin American country at Cannes.
“Our cinema is a living and vibrant entity, a cinema full of authoritative perspectives precariously able to express our own experiences in a global way and on the same level as the major filmmaking regions,” says CinemaChile CEO, Constanza Arena, noting this from Chile’s strong performance.
“The directors of a new wave of Chilean cinema are taking on powerful themes with deep socio-historical weight, but with new stylistic innovations, whether it’s Manuela Martelli’s 1976 political shock, or the LGBTQ+ theme in Las Criaturas que se Derriten Bajo Céspedes’s quest. With their boldness, they advance a generation. Fresh from Chilean and Latin American cinema forward,” Arina notes.
Chile’s Quijote Films has also co-produced the two directors’ bi-weekly “Pamfir”, also Ukrainian drama from Polish and French Madants film Les Films D’Ici.
While Cespedes, 27, prefers not to delve into Chile’s past political trauma, Martelli, the famous actress (“Machuca,” “El Futuro”) whose directorial debut “1976” follows a middle-class woman relentlessly drawn to horror. From the dictatorship of Pinochet, he feels that the female view of this terrible period in Chilean history is rarely explored.
“With the spread of film schools over the past 10 years in Chile, there has certainly been an upsurge in diverse viewpoints, including the feminine,” she says, noting that there is renewed energy and freedom to engage in new subjects.
In fact, at least ten Chilean films have already made an impact this year, from two Oscar nominations (“Bestia,” “Spencer”), Francesca Allegria’s Sundance pick “The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future.” The anchors of Malaga and Rotterdam by Bernardo Quesni and Roberto Dufres, and the Toulouse, Guadalajara and Tallinn Black Knight Awards for Nicolas Postiglione’s first feature ‘The Immersion’.
For Postiglione, who spent the first ten years of his life in the United States before moving to Chile, his stories are set in Chile, but his work style and sensibilities are American. “I was then living in the United States, so I would feel like an opportunist if I went down that road,” he says of whether he would make a film about the period when Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military regime ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990.
Céspedes, who was born five years after that dark era ended, belongs to the new generation of filmmakers in Chile who are more influenced by the trends of world cinema and take advantage of the new, inexpensive technology that has made filmmaking more accessible. His upcoming debut movie, not unlike his shorts, appears from a child’s point of view. The film “The Mysterious Look of Flamingos” takes place in a mining camp surrounded by an unknown disease.
Alejandro Fernandez, best known for the Sundance award-winning thriller “To Kill a Man,” is venturing into what he describes as metaphysical science fiction in his seventh movie, “The Gray Beyond.” “I’ve been developing it since 2015 and the pandemic has inspired some major changes,” says Fernandez, who cites Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Blade Runner,” “Alien” and “Stalker” influences among his influences.
“The epidemic also had another good result: more people discovered Chilean cinema,” says its producer Florencia Laria, who said that Onda Media, the streaming service that offers only Chilean films, has seen a boom in viewership. There is already a sense of hope in the air, spurred by President-elect Gabriel Borek, 35, who has pledged to more than double the state’s contribution to the arts.
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