Traveling Festival: the Chile of Dominga Sotomayor, a country and a filmmaker to discover

After Beirut, New Orleans, or Prague, the focus proposed by the Rennes Traveling festival team is this year on Santiago in Chile (until February 14).

© Traveling / Clair-Obscur

Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec

7 mins

Director and producer, Dominga Sotomayor is one of the guests of the Traveling de Rennes festival which welcomes this year, in its “focus on a foreign city” section, Santiago de Chile.

Chile, a country of cinema with directors with a variety of proposals, in documentary or fiction, sometimes very linked to current events or the political history of the country, sometimes exploring autofiction and intimacy.

This is the case of Dominga Sotomayor.

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from our special correspondent,

She came to Rennes with several films she has directed and one of her latest productions which will be released on screens in France in March,

, Manuela Martelli's first feature film.

A film that plunges us back into the police terror that followed Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état in September 1973, fifty years ago this year.

Dominga Sotomayor has also produced with his company

other films that have been seen on French screens such as

by Argentina's Marí Alessandrini, yet another first feature film, or

, a film Argentinian horror film by Alejandro Fadel, released in 2019.

His own films, despite the prizes won and the festivals that hosted them, have not yet been distributed in France.

His first feature film,

, nevertheless came from the Cinéfondation in Cannes and his last film, 

won the prize for best director at the Locarno festival in 2018 and at Rotterdam the following year. .

It's because Domingo Sotomayor digs a very personal furrow that she explained during the presentations of her films at Traveling in front of packed houses, in particular attentive and curious young people from the city's classes, because the Traveling festival is also a transmitter of movie theater.

The Chilean director and producer Dominga Sotomayor, guest of the Rennes Traveling festival, during a meeting with students: the festival wants to be a film smuggler.

It organizes masterclasses, round tables, meetings with teachers and high school students, and image education actions all year round.

© Isabelle Le Gonidec

I make films with very little, the director almost apologizes, little things from everyday life, often inspired by my own story.

The big story, she leaves it to other directors or media.

It responds to desires for personal films, alternating formats and genres.

Thus, in

, it depicts a somewhat hippie community that lives in wooden houses open to nature.

It is lit by candlelight, the water comes in through makeshift pipes.

They chose to live away from Santiago to escape the oppression of the regime - what her own parents did when she was a little girl, says Dominga Sotomayor -.

In this film, she is Clara, the little girl who lost her dog, but also Sofia, the teenager who only dreams of leaving the group to fly on her own and incidentally have electricity at home.

An initiation film on adolescent questions, love, friendship, death, which brings together well-known actors like Antonia Zegers or Alejandro Goic, familiar with the boards and cinema of

by Manuela Martelli), adults who seem a little lost, and a slew of children and teenagers, including Demian Hernández (Sofia) and Antar Machado in the role of Lucas, her rejected lover.

Children at the heart of the story 

A micro-society that wants to believe in its dream of nature in the middle of the forest, but where class relations emerge.

The group does not escape the recreation of the social inequalities in which all Chilean society is immersed: it is this dog that one buys from a modest family thinking that it is the animal of the family which has been lost;

it is this worker who does not participate in the feasts of the community;

it's her little boy who dances imitating Michael Jackson (a nod to the film

by Pablo Larraín?) when the other children are squirming around... like children!

Speaking of children, Dominga Sotomayor's work of directing “actors” -because these children are natural actors- is amazing.

The interactions, the games... are stunningly fresh and natural.

Children have no prejudices, they know how to play with emotions in the first sense of the term, explains the filmmaker.

A remark echoes the work of another director, Carla Simon.

In her two feature films (

and

), the Catalan also stages children and teenagers and it is their point of view that the viewer embraces.

A cinematographic complicity unites these two young filmmakers -both of whom studied at the Barcelona film school- since in the films presented at Travelling, we could discover

, a video correspondence in which they exchange memories and questions in images and with their voices.

Filmed letters that also echo

between another Catalan, José Luis Guerín and the writer and director Jonas Mekas.

The short film ends with images of smoke, demonstrations on which Dominga Sotomayor recounts, between dismay and anger, the social explosion of October 2019 and its repression.

" 

".

This is the time when the political becomes intimate, she explains.

The forest of

, the desert of

, the beach of

or even

, the island in Patagonia: Dominga Sotomayor plays with natural spaces, because it is there that she feels more comfortable, she explains again, it is outside the city "

".

Nature is a full protagonist in her films and not necessarily friendly like this cathartic fire in

a fire that she really experienced as a child

the endless desert road in

even the Atlantic Ocean and its rolls in

A nature magnificently filmed by talented cinematographers such as the Peruvian Inti Briones, or the Argentinian Barbara Alvarez, with plays on natural lights, very white, saturated with sunlight in

or

, as if to melt the tensions that convent.

Before writing, there is the image

Another protagonist, more surprising, cars.

Four of his films presented at Traveling open with departures by car... His characters are people who leave or have left: gone on vacation - in a sort of upside-down road movie, suggests Dominga Sotomayor, since what matters is not where they go, but what they leave behind, or characters who have fled the city.

The car is an instrument of transfer, a refuge for children, a tool of emancipation for teenagers who dream of driving, a vehicle of death in

or a scam in

... it is a place of life, a concentration of tensions where we discover the landscapes or the family, depending on the positioning of the camera. 

“

”, explains the director: the children on the roof of the car, the dog running behind the car, the vehicles with the passengers inside, etc: “before the 

.

".

"

 it", that's how Dominga Sotomayor makes her films: it's a bit like an impressionist painting, she adds.

We construct a situation, a space;

characters by small touches, starting from things that we know.

This makes the characters, the situations more complex, more moving and therefore more universal: everyone can complete the film with their own story.

We would like a wider audience to be able to discover his films and experience the same emotions as the privileged guests of the Traveling festival.

► The Rennes Traveling Festival website

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