April 14, 2023
Promising Chilean productions with promising directors cross the mountain range to land in the new edition of Bafici 2023. Among them is Diego Soto, director of “Deaths and Wonders”, who will have his world premiere in the official feature film competition.
The film is the second feature by Diego (Un fuego lejano, 2019) produced by Manuel Vlastelica and Florencia Dupont (Las Noches Cine) seeks to touch that close fiber by portraying the story of a group of teenagers dealing with the death of a friend the first summer after leaving school.
Along with him will be 6 Chileans who will be participating in this new edition of Bafici from April 19 to May 1, which highlights productions such as : Las Demas by Alexandra Hyland ; The Eternal memory by Maite Alberdi ; Concordia by Diego Véli ; In the bathroom the moths die by Natalia Mejias and Fernanda Lagomarsino; Pablo Cerda’s Educación Física and José Bohr’s El gran circo de chamorro.
Before the festival we wanted to talk to Diego Soto, the director who will be participating in the official feature film competition, premiering “Deaths and Wonders”.
Get to know the details of the world premiere and the line up of Chile here!
 | “In Argentina we are making films that interest us for their way of constantly reflecting on the cinematographic forms”Diego Soto |
This is my second feature film. One with very personal elements that arises from some reflections on my adolescence in Rancagua, the lives of my friends of that time and the theme of the death of close friends.
I still didn’t want to make it too personal, so I wanted to explore the life of my brother (10 years younger) and his friends, see what things of my adolescence were reflected in them and what things were different. His friends joined the game, and the production was incorporating more of their features. So the film grew and became a portrait of a group of friends, their families, their homes, their group dynamics. Ordinary lives that I find valuable, funny and touching.
Like the previous film, we filmed in the city of Rancagua, with non-professional actors, who are mostly family, friends and many of them are repeated in both films.
Both films were made with the same method and the same intention, playing with the daily life of that city, mixing the real life of non-actors with their characters and at the same time including documentary and fantastic or mysterious elements.
Our proposal is modest, low budget and without any stars, but we seek to show worlds and lives that are not normally represented in the cinema. Although the film’s main theme is poetry and the common lives of provincial teenagers, it is also full of film references.
It seems to me that these elements may have attracted the attention of the Bafici, a fascinating space that makes massive interest in cinemas other than commercial.
After Bafici the plan is to follow other festivals, especially in Latin America and Europe. And during the second semester we will have the theatrical premiere.