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Chilean films have arrived in force in the 2019 vintage of the San Sebastián International Film Festival. They are present in all sections. You'll find filmmakers, such as documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzman, who presented his next film The Cordillera of Dreams , and Andrès Wood, who will represent Chile at the Oscars with Araña . But also other authors, less known on this side of the Atlantic, and landing with demanding films, with a sharp or critical look at Chilean society.
From our special correspondent in San Sebastián,
Any selection has a part of arbitrariness. We have selected three from the wide selection, ten feature films, Chilean films presented at Cannes. Each one, with a writing and a point of view of its own, explores particular intimacies and questions the Chilean society.
Ana and Maria
Vendrá la muerte y tendrá tus ojos by José Luis Torres Leiva has been selected in the official competition. This title, borrowed from the last text that the writer Cesare Pavese left on his table before killing himself in 1950, tells the chronicle of a death announced. We follow a couple of women, one of whom, sick and refusing the latest treatments that medicine offers, has chosen to die. How to tell death? How to accompany with his camera the end of a love story? How can love transcend anger and the feeling of injustice that the protagonists inevitably feel?
It is a film of infinite tenderness and great modesty, gestures held in fixed shots, skin against skin, long glances exchanged. Because time is running out, beautifully performed by the two actresses, Amparo Noguera and Julieta Figueroa. To this main story are added two other sequences in the form of stories, which also feed in their own way the questioning of the filmmaker on the relationship to the other: a neat bourgeois who gives himself a few hours to a brief and passionate story of love (the most beautiful he will be given to live, he writes) with another man; and an old woman who "adopts" a wild child, not a child-wolf but a child-dog, while respecting its nature first. The whole film - except the hospital footage - is shot in a beautiful nature, made of woods and lakes. Or when the traditional opposition nature / culture, so pregnant in the Latin American imaginary, is erased.
Family closed
We find this beautiful nature in another film, Algunas bestias , by Jorge Riquelme. But while she was the complicit framework of the loves of the previous film, in this second film it serves as a showcase and revealer to the darkness of the characters. The animals ( bestias ), here, are not wild animals ... Lock up a Chilean family on an island, let simmer in camera a few hours, moreover without water and without heating ... the result is explosive! Behind the smiles, hugs, tender relationships displayed in this family of the good bourgeoisie gathered for a weekend on an island in the middle of the woods, lies a great hardness, monstrous selfishness and hatred of class.
Trailer Algunas bestias (Somebeasts) by Jorge Riquelme Serrano from Laberinto Films on Vimeo.
The varnish cracks fast enough, just like the paintings of this old house, that this couple of forty, with their two teenage children, wants to renovate to make it an inn. They seek the help of their more affluent parents, played by Paulina Garcia - of unknown violence - and Alfredo Castro. A luxury casting for the first film of this young director, who won the prize Ciné en construction at the Toulouse festival. And a particularly difficult role for him, told us Alfredo Castro, actor yet seasoned and off-road. " If there is a" philie "that I can not understand, it's pedophilia. Seeing this scene provokes in me a feeling of horror. But that's my job! He said.
" Family, I hate you! " Jorge Riquelme revisits this cry of André Gide - and others. The theme of the family is very strong and sensitive in Chile, because of the Catholic tradition of this country, continues Alfredo Castro. Moreover, the Chilean Constitution establishes the family as the central nucleus of society. And on this dark island is concentrated all that the family can contain violence.
El Potro y El Principe
It is a "family" of a very different kind that tells Sebastián Muñoz in El Principe (The Prince) , presented in the Latin Horizontes section and also from Ciné en construction. Filmed in a real disused prison in the outskirts of Santiago, this dark, almost dirty, closed-door camera tells the story of the life of a group of prisoners imprisoned in a (family) cell and the social organization of the prison. They are all men and we follow them in their daily life in its banality and crudity: meals, showers, forced or consensual sex, the violence of prison guards, hierarchies between prisoners. How old men, like El Potro played by Alfredo Castro still, decidedly unavoidable in such difficult roles, take under their protection kids like El Principe.
The action of the film is at the end of the 1960s, since the film ends on the inauguration speech of Salvador Allende in November 1970. A choice of the director. One of the most violent moments of the film, a rape, is the fact of prison guards. A scene that augurs terrible times to come after the fall of Allende, says Sebastián Muñoz during the presentation of the film. The director recounts feeding films like The Kiss of the Spider-Woman of the Brazilian Hector Babenco, or A Prophet by Jacques Audiard, for his own work.
Originally, too, there was an eponymous novel by Mario Cruz, published by the author. He wanted to write about homosexuality. However, this one being then penally repressed , explains Alfredo Castro, he used the artifice of the prison to put it in scene. If homosexuality is no longer officially repressed, it is still stigmatized. Relationships between men have already been treated in other films, such as A Fantastic Woman with Daniela Vega. But taboos are hard-skinned and the path remains long. Moreover, explains the director, the gendarmerie officials refused for three years to serve the prison for the filming, precisely because of its theme. However, the subject of the film is wider: it is more a film of initiation and a history of the friendship which is knotted between El Potro and the young Principle.
Contemporary Chilean cinema paints a crude, uncompromising portrait of Chilean society, pointing out its flaws and lies, searching the flesh where it hurts. A cinema that challenges and makes known Chile and its creators across borders. Also, the recent cuts in public aid to film creation decided by the Chilean government raise a lot of concerns.