Traveling Festival: Chilean cinema, successes and paradoxes

Rennes, Traveling festival with a focus on Santiago de Chile, opening night on February 7, 2023. © Gilles Pensart / Traveling

Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec

9 mins

Traveling, these are screenings, but also round tables and debates on cinema as a medium and as an industry.

How do you make a film, what do you put in it and for what audience.

Chilean cinema has exploded onto screens around the world, but what are we seeing on screens in Chile?

Response elements.

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Making films – we are talking here about auteur cinema in the broad sense – is one thing, ensuring that they are seen in the country where they are made is another.

" 

Carlos Ossa, professor at the University of Santiago, director of the University Cinematheque of Santiago and invited by the

,

» The production is financed by various public funds, a system put in place during the

(the governments of Patricio Aylwin, Eduardo Frei and Ricardo Lagos) for a new cultural policy aimed at “ 

”.

At the start of the 1990s, several decisive milestones were set, such as the creation of a special line of credit for the production of national films at the National Bank, the creation of the National Fund for the Development and Culture of the Arts (FONDART) and the Film school.

In Chile, most artists, whatever their field of activity (dance, plastic arts, cinema, theatre), produce their works thanks to these funds.

During a screening at Traveling, Ignacio Agüero told how he wrote a script to obtain financing for his film and then he tore up the paper to precede everything else...

►

: Santiago de Chile in the cinema, a thousand faces and a thousand images

The country thus has a very large corpus of works of all kinds, but very few spaces to show them.

Most of the potential public is therefore little aware of national artistic production, especially since the public media have no legal obligation to broadcast works or to echo this production: it is according to the goodwill of the broadcasters, underlines Carlos Ossa.

“

”.

There have been attempts

to reserve a space for national works, but they did not succeed.

The boost from Hollywood

Regarding cinema, the vast majority of cinemas are owned by private companies, often linked to (North American) distributors, who will

Chilean national production.

But internationally recognized Chilean films, such as 

by Sebastian Lelio, which won the Oscar for best foreign film in 2018, benefit from this boost for their distribution in Chile.

This film was even broadcast on the Chilean Catholic channel because of its dubbing in Hollywood, told

, specialist in Latin American cinema and guest of the festival, at the microphone of Maria Caroliña Piña of RFI in Spanish.

On a completely different note, all of

's documentaries , such as 

 only

.

Patricio Guzman in Santiago de Chile on the set of “Nostalgia for Light” (2010) patricioguzman.com

During the military dictatorship, Carlos Ossa points out ironically, there was a space reserved for national production on television: it was on Thursdays and it started with "

”.

Milton Friedman and his Chicago boys who set up an ultraliberal economy, still largely operational, and which left a large part of the population on the side of the road.

" 

.

The various audiovisual laws have favored a process of industrialization of cinema, but not the cinema industry: they have increased the volume of production (figures), but that does not make it an industry, if only because of the lack of a broadcast system.

Daniela Vega, the actress who interprets the role of Marina in the film by Sebastian Lelio.

advitamdistribution.com

Going to the cinema has a cost  

However, for the public, in a

, the circulation of works has a cost: if only to go to the cinema, in addition to the price of the ticket itself (1.5 pesos), there is transportation.

The

per month, in a country where the cost of living is high: housing, electricity, studies... We remember that the

was triggered by the rise in the price of subway ticket.

Many people have never had access to a cinema, as shown in the selection of Traveling the documentary

by Ignacio Aguëro and the discovery for the children of these underprivileged neighborhoods and for their parents of what is the magic of the moving image.

Anti-government demonstration in Santiago (Chile), October 28, 2019. © REUTERS / Edgard Garrido

“

 ”.

However, over the past twenty years, the idea that cinema could also generate income through advertising, sponsorship and brands, taxation (VAT on tickets for example), has matured, tempers Carlos Ossa. 

The State absolves itself of its responsibility, he continues, because many of these artistic productions could be used, for example, within the framework of educational programs in schools.

There are also undoubtedly political reasons for this disengagement from the distribution sector: certain works call into question, sometimes quite radically, a political and social organization.

And the broadcasting networks that belong to the ruling class - industrial and financial - have no interest in undermining the system.

A parallel broadcast network

Most of the films presented at the Traveling festival will never be shown on television.

They can be in the cinema, in particular rooms: independent networks considered as arthouse cinema, festivals, university cinematheques, etc.

That of the University of Santiago holds more than 17,000 documents, specifies Carlos Ossa who directs the University Cinematheque: excerpts from silent films, documentaries, amateur films, fiction, advertisements, etc.

It is this parallel circuit that allows a - restricted - public to discover this cinema.

" 

", recalls Carlos Ossa.

On this indicative table you can see the number of Chilean (dark blue line) and foreign (turquoise line) films distributed in Chile in 2019 (source: Ministry of Culture) © Ministry of Culture Chile (www.cultura.gob. cl)

When asked which films among Chilean auteur cinema have had the most success in recent years, Carlos Ossa hesitates: it's hard to say because there are no more statistics on attendance at theaters and all attempts at image education have fizzled out.

As a general rule, the films that do best are comedies, fictions that depict contemporary Chile and documentaries on the recent history of the country.

The selection made for Traveling is representative of a certain sector of film production: it offers a particular look at Chile, still very much linked to the tragedy that was the 1973 coup d'etat and it is a discussion that, indeed, we had with Anne Le Hénaff, programmer of the festival,

"An eternal coup"

These latter films are not co-produced by European circuits and therefore interest distributors little or escape them.

"

", quips Carlos Ossa, who recalls the work of filmmakers who emancipate themselves from this tragedy or consider it differently, working on other materials such as the duo

or

- who can be seen in the first part of Ignacio Agüero's documentary, 

 in which he questions several directors on the way of making cinema under the military regime and what is cinematography.

Cristián Sanchez, who theorized the concept of "

", is a director of a cinema apart and has a very fine reflection on cinema.

He has written many essays and articles on directors like Bresson, Buñuel, Eric Rohmer, Raúl Ruiz.

But despite the flaws in its structural organization, there is a demand for cinema, especially from a young audience, who did not experience 1973 and the military dictatorship.

Film schools are turning, it's a given.

So many films that we hope to see more widely distributed there and here.

►

: Chile by Dominga Sotomayor, a country and a filmmaker to discover

► The website of the Traveling festival

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