After winning 3 awards at the Work in Progress of the Toulouse Latin American Film Festival, the film 1976, Manuela Martelli’s first feature, is selected in the prestigious Directors’ Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival, promising a rising career for the new director.

The 95” minute fiction drama introduces us to Carmen, masterfully played by prominent national actress Aline Kuppenheim.  A story set in 1976, where its protagonist enters unknown waters, far from the quiet life to which she is accustomed.

During March, the director Manuela Martelli and the two Chilean producers – Omar Zuñiga (Cinestación) and Alejandra García (Wood Producciones) – gave us all the details of their participation in the Cine en Construcción of the Toulouse Latin Film Festival.

In the preview of Cannes, we had an exclusive conversation with Aline Kuppenheim, and here we’ll tell you all about the “behind the scenes” details of her creative process to play as Carmen:

“Carmen’s awakening, with all her contradictions and weaknesses, is, for me, today, what I would expect or dream of a society like ours,” says Aline.

Martelli makes her feature film debut with this film. What do you think is Manuela’s main strength as a director? How was the experience of being directed by her?

The total coherence between her sensitivity, multidisciplinary preparation and experience, her references, her requirement and her rigour in the work. The sum of all this is a sensitive and theoretical clarity about her own proposal, which allows, perhaps paradoxically for some, an availability, a competence to solve and add to the result the variables that arise from the given conditions, the proposals of the team, the nature of the physical and human space, the limitations imposed to the progress of an independent production in Chile, and that supposes a shooting inserted in the real life.

This clarity and ownership is transmitted as a chain reaction within the whole team; in the empathetic and warm treatment that generates community, loyalties and virtuous circles, where each one commits and puts the best of their abilities and vocation in the process and the result, which is fundamental if we think that in a film crew, each member, each area is fundamental and indispensable.

Manuela gives that security of giving herself as an instrument that corresponds to a whole and trusts a little blindly, as it is usually in cinema.

In terms of my experience, I can define it as professional and also as personal with diffuse lines in between. From that personal, fervent context, existing emotional ties and those that appeared during the filming (outside our homes for a long period), gave me the restraint and the confidence to access a type of concentration or connection with certain fragile, painful or sensitive states to give body to that script and to resist the not minor physical and mental demands that the filming involved for all of us.

Something interesting about this work is that you never quite understand how it really serves. I see more and more clearly the importance of the human component that colors, for better or for worse, what the audience will perceive beyond what they will see with the eyes, call it honesty or whatever you want.

What makes you accept the lead role in her movie?

All the above plus her script, her proposal and the long conversations we had with Manuela for at least 5 years, every so often, telling us about our mothers and grandmothers, how they lived and saw certain things the women who preceded us, trying to enter these existences and realities, understand them and understand what is left of them in all of us, thinking about them without judging and trying to build them as alive and concrete as possible to tell this story.

The film is about the social awakening of a woman of the Chilean aristocracy during the years of dictatorship. How do you think her story dialogues with the country’s present? Do you feel that this is a way of reflecting, through the past, on what is happening today?

Since its title, 1976 is also an exercise in memory that refers, without hiding it, to our recent history, despite being a fiction.

Memory is in itself a dialogue with the present given that it is always exercised in the present and turns on the alarms when history threatens to repeat itself or when it rightfully becomes flesh and experience for the new generations, as is happening today in our country.

So, cinema approaches and reaches those places where the rhetoric of politics or slogan does not reach. It gives face, body, voice, texture and humanity to sometimes abstract concepts for many and passes it by emotion, by the personal experience that is to see and appropriate a film as something lived and thus recorded in the body, in one’s own memory, for example.

Carmen’s awakening, with all her contradictions and weaknesses, is, for me, today, what I would expect or dream of a society like ours.

 No film is just about what the writers reflected or wrote or what the director meant, but about what each of the viewers discovered, understood, reflected, felt or concluded (or not) from their own perspective and context, from that more or less complex proposal. As if a movie will multiply its versions by the number of viewers who saw it. So yes, it is one more way to reflect, to see, feel and think about all our diversity, something so necessary today, more than ever.

How do you think the audience in Cannes will receive this film?

 I hope that goes well! I believe that the film contains in itself a vision from the micro to the macro, from the domestic and the particular to the political, which I hope will be appreciated by the non-Chilean audience. That is, a film with a particular Chilean identity, perfectly extrapolatable to other identities in this globalized world that shares certain issues in different ways.