Children of the coup: Chilean cinema after Pinochet

[Judi Lynn]

A retrospective of 21st-century Chilean film at the Seminci Film Festival in Spain revealed how the national cinema has flourished and diversified in the post-Pinochet era. If only these exciting films could be seen in the rest of the world.

Mar Diestro-Dópido
6 April 2017

Premieres are the bread and butter of most film festivals, the element that most obviously defines them, offering the perk of seeing something new before anyone else. For another type of festivalgoer, though, the main incentive lies elsewhere, in thoughtfully curated retrospectives that in their own way set a festival apart from its competitors. The Seminci Film Festival in Valladolid, the second oldest in Spain after San Sebastián, has struck a balance between the old and the new throughout its 61 years, garnering a particular reputation for showing cutting-edge European auteur cinema.

In each edition there is at least one retrospective organised around the cinema of a given country: recently Finland, Argentina and Mexico were featured. Chile was the focus of Seminci’s 61st edition, with a programme entitled Chilean Cinema of the Democracy, meaning the cinema of the new millennium and the beginning of full democracy. Included in the programme were a total of 29 films. That’s 20 features – fiction and documentaries – and nine shorts, with directors ranging from international stars (Pablo Larraín, Patricio Guzmán) to locally known names (Cristián Sánchez, director of 2008’s Tiempos Malos; Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, director of 2007’s Mirageman), providing a welcome introduction to what is widely acknowledged to be an exciting resurgence of Chilean cinema.

It felt like a timely event given that Chile’s most celebrated director, Larraín, has just released two high-profile films, putting Chilean talent on the international map and among the Oscar frenzy, with his anti-biopic of one of the country’s most politicised and notorious figures, poet Pablo Neruda; and his first foray into English-language, studio-backed cinema with a study of an even bigger icon, Jackie Kennedy.

A roundtable discussion including seven of the Chilean filmmakers featured provided useful context. This panel was moderated by Pablo Marín, academic, historian, critic and writer of perhaps the most valuable supplementary material to this event, a beautifully illustrated book surveying the 16 years covered by the retrospective. Much of the content and many of the quotes in this piece are indebted to both this roundtable event and this book, as well as my own viewing of three or four Chilean films a day for a week, some of which were screening for the first time outside Latin America.

More:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/festivals/chilean-cinema-after-pinochet

[Judi Lynn]

1. Neruda, film review: On the trail of a brave and ruthless Chilean hero

Neruda, film review: On the trail of a brave and ruthless Chilean hero

The law of the jungle doesn’t apply in Pablo Larrain’s meta-portrait of the Chilean poet and political activist Pablo Neruda, says Charlotte O'Sullivan


CHARLOTTE O'SULLIVAN a day ago


In the mood for a game of cat and mouse? The law of the jungle doesn’t apply in Pablo Larrain’s meta-portrait of the Chilean poet and political activist, forced in 1948 to go underground and, eventually, into exile.

Luis Gnecco’s Neruda is silver-tongued but no adonis (imagine Alex Salmond in outrageous garb). Ruthless, as well as brave, he’s adept at spinning other people’s anguish into fictional gold (his intelligent, long-suffering spouse refers to herself as “the absurd wife”, resigned to the fact that this is how he will one day portray her). Meanwhile, Oscar (Gael Garcia Bernal), the conservative inspector on Neruda’s tail, is young, sensitive and gorgeous. The twist? He’s not all there.

The car chase scenes are visually stunning (filmed against obviously artificial backdrops, they resemble outlandishly urgent clips from Hitchcock’s The Birds). And what happens to the two men in the Andes is uncannily picturesque. Meanwhile, ordinary people suffer non-metaphysical horrors (we get glimpses of a concentration camp, presided over by the young Pinochet).

Can someone with a voice truly understand the voiceless? In one of the edgiest scenes a fan who’s drunk, miserable and/or mentally unstable (thanks to Ximena Rivas’s beautifully ambiguous cameo, we can’t quite tell) accosts our equality-loving hero and implies he’s swallowed his own hype. Larrain clearly adores Neruda but hasn’t swallowed anything. Man dreams up myth. Start of story.

http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/film/neruda-film-review-on-the-trail-of-a-brave-and-ruthless-chilean-hero-a3510126.html