The Chilean capital did not appear, a priori, like a city of cinema like Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City or Buenos Aires, which Traveling has already hosted. But over the course of the Rennes festival, Santiago takes on flesh. A crucible city where cultures and migrations mix, where political decisions are made, and where history, big and small, is made, it becomes cinematographic.
From our special correspondent in Rennes,
If Santiago is relatively unknown, Chile is associated with strong images. Those of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and repression. Those also of the major demonstrations of the end of 2019, violently repressed, the demonstrations of women against gender violence orchestrated by the collective Las Tesisthe election of the new president Gabriel Boric and the referendum on the new Constitution, etc. These snapshots can be found in the cinema offer offered by the Traveling festival.
Fiction or documentary, the selection offers a dive into the contemporary history of the country. The essential productions of the last thirty years are there: the documentaries of Patricio Guzmanwhich offer a political and poetic panorama of the history of Chile since the election of Salvador Allende, those also of Carmen Castillo ; both first worked from exile before returning to Santiago in fruitful round trips.
In fiction, Chilean directors now established among filmmakers known throughout the world recount the upheavals of these fifty years, like Pablo Larrain with Santiago 1973 Post Mortem, Tony Manero or Nowhich features the “no” of the Chileans in the referendum organized by Pinochet in October 1988; of Sebastian Lelio who, through his fantasy women portraits, defends the right to otherness; by Andrés Wood, now more of a producer, but whose film Mi Amigo Machuca opened the ban, for an international audience, to the new Chilean auteur cinema in 2004. And among the more recent productions, The Veronica by Leonardo Medel, on image manipulation and social networks.
The idea of devoting an edition to Santiago de Chile began to germinate around 2019, explains Anne Le Hénaff, artistic director of the festival and programmer: it takes time and relays to set up a program. But given that we are in 2023, the fiftieth anniversary of the coup, now was the time! Then, in this profusion of sources and images, it was necessary to find a common thread, how to tell Santiago, its tensions between past and present, its bubbling capital, but also the intimacy of the daily life of its inhabitants, to try to understand why the country exploded in October 2019 and finally summon the gaze of filmmakers on their city. ” Cinema is not only a reflection of the present time, but we arrive at this present time because there are stories “, she explains. It was then that the project to invite Ignacio Agüero and Dominga Sotomayor in particular matured.
Ignacio Agüero, a “ Santiago portrait painter »
The documentary filmmaker Ignacio Agüero has become obvious, says the programmer. His most recent films are very directly linked to Santiago, but it is an intimate city that is told to us: that of the district in which the director lives, Providencia, which is disappearing because of real estate speculation. A middle-class district, rather well-to-do if we judge by the size and the appearance of these beautiful houses on which the bulldozers are beating in This is where we build (where the place where I was born no longer exists).
If Ignacio Agüero had a retrospective of his works at the Biarritz festival in 2021, his documentary cinema is little distributed in France. ” When I saw El otro dia, I loved it!enthuses Anne Le Henaff, I met him in Cannes, we talked a lot and it was obvious: if you want to do a portrait of Santiago, he is the one to invite... He integrates his own life into the narration in back and forth between the intimate and the collective “. He films his house, his loved ones, the window that opens onto the garden, the light that caresses the objects and the photos…
For the purposes of his film El otro dia (The other day), he goes to the people who knock on his door: postman, delivery man, beggars, sweeper… Red threads stretched over a large map of the city make it possible to visualize the movements in distant neighborhoods and draw up a new geography of his city . ” This wire is the tracking shot, the cheapest in the world “, quips the director. In another movie, Nunca suffered el Provincia (Never have I climbed the Provincia), the comings and goings are made between the house and the inhabitants of the district. ” Ignacio Aguero is the counterpart of Patricio, they are from the same generation. He too is a real storyteller who works the past and the present through the nature of the country”.
Before working on the material offered by his city, this director with a long career also documented political repression with a punchy documentary offered to Travelling, No olvidar (Do not forget) on the Lonquen massacre, carried out in 1982 under a pseudonym, or even the discovery of cinema by children from poor neighborhoods in Cien niños esperando un tren (A hundred children waiting for a train), moving film from 1988. A filmmaker who constantly questions cinema in his work, to the point of making cinema with his life.
Dominga Sotomayor, the crush
Another leading guest, Dominga Sotomayor, a favourite… In her films, the young director tells the story of people who leave, who leave the city. But the social reality of the country is there, in hollow, for who knows how to see it: these are stories of “real people” since his films are largely autofictional, inspired by images of his childhood, memories, people around him. . But their intimate touch, these little things that make up everyday life, may not correspond to what French broadcasters expect, hence their invisibility on this side of the Atlantic.
► Read also : Chile by Dominga Sotomayor at the Traveling festival, a country and a filmmaker to discover
It was necessary to bring the copies and translate his films, for lack of distribution. ” Maybe she’s not nails? asks Anne Le Hénaff. Dominga Sotomayor is not in the representation that one can have, from the outside, of Chilean cinema, that is to say a committed cinematography, very anchored in the political history of the country: the military dictatorship and the repression which followed, an outrageous economic liberalism that left millions of people on the side of the road, the successive revolts until the explosion of 2019. ” There is a misunderstanding of his narrative palette and staging, regrets Anne Le Hénaff.
The construction of a screenplay, the choices of editing and staging… everything that makes a film – as an echo of the recurring question posed by Ignacio Agüero to these college filmmakers in one of his films: “ what is cinematography? – are analyzed alongside the projections. Travelling, it’s pedagogy: the proposals are relayed in schools with the operation college in cinemawith students and teachers, in an ever-renewed desire for education, awakening to the image and the construction of a cinematographic narrative.
And Traveling Santiago is also a focus on animated films, including the short film Bestiaby multi-award winning director Hugo Covarrubias, reprints on the Mapuche issue, literature, a selection of films by Alejandro Jodorowsky, a marvelous touch of everything, hyper inventive, or even films by visual artist Enrique Ramirez. So many proposals are renewed each year for the guest city (in recent years Prague, New Orleans or Beirut have been honored) and it is also of course a party.