July 7, 2023
From 6 to 16 July, the first screening of “What you haven’t seen of Chilean cinema” will be held on the Filmin platform.
The event organized by CinemaChile and Filmin – The Spanish film platform- will allow you to watch 6 films that have never been distributed in Spain before, with titles so emblematic of the country, such as Tony Manero by Pablo Larraín, The Grown-Ups by Maite Alberdi, Private Messages by Matias Bize, and more recent works such as My Brothers dream awake by Claudia Huaiquimilla, Roberto Doveris’ Phantom Project and The Sky is Red by Francina Carbonell.
This first screening is part of the activities to reach the final audience next to the most important platform in Spain that currently has 78 Chilean films.
This event, the first to be carried out by CinemaChile with a European platform, “comes to show films of great international impact and with a large number of awards” says Ximena Baeza, Executive Director of CinemaChile and “extends in an arc of time from 2008 to 2022” evidencing the wide thematic proposal of Chilean cinema. There are 4 fiction and two non-fiction feature films, with 3 female directors. Baeza says that of 219 international awards won last year, 88 were made by women directors and producers.
Filmin is a pioneering platform in Spain, of auteur cinema and series, created in 2007 that in recent years has become a benchmark with more than 15,000 works in its subscription catalog, among which you can find recent Chilean works such as 1976, The mole agent, Veronica and earlier as A Fantastic Woman and Violeta se fue a los cielos, among others.
It also has more than 400 thematic collections receiving the distinction of Best Cultural Project in 2021 and 2022 by the Observatory of Culture. It is also a film distributor and among their latest acquisitions are the recent winners of the Golden Lion (All the beauty and the bloodshed), the Golden Bear (On the Adamant) and the Palme d’Or (Anatomy of a fall).
Discover here the films that will be seen in Spain!
The film that headlines this showcase is Tony Manero by Pablo Larraín, who celebrates 15 years since its premiere and was the film that launched internationally this acclaimed film director (whose films have already been nominated in different categories for the Oscar) Emma, Jackie, Spencer, among others.
The film also launched actor Alfredo Castro, currently one of the most acclaimed and recognized performers of Ibero-American cinema (winner three times at the Platino Awards and in 2019: Starlight International Cinema Award from the Venice International Film Festival for his career, among others). The story takes place in 1978, in the midst of the brutal dictatorship of Pinochet, tells the story of a man obsessed with the protagonist of Saturday Night Fever and finds an escape to that reality.
The Grown-Ups is the third film in the great and brilliant career of Maite Alberdi. This feature film toured more than 70 Festivals from the IDFA in Rotterdam, Hot Docs in Canada through Sydney, Greece, Taiwan, Iceland, Israel, the United States, Barcelona and Valladolid in Spain, among many others. Without a doubt, it is the prelude to the road at a global level, in visibility, that leads to the fourth film The Mole Agent, Alberdi achieving being the first Chilean director, and the first in the documentary competition of her country, to be nominated for an Oscar, in 2021. In the particular tone of this director, where humor always has a place, she tells how a group of friends with Down syndrome have been attending the same school for 40 years, and they are tired of being treated like children. They are adults and want to live as such.
Director Matías Bize, known in Spain since he won La Espiga de Oro (Valladolid) with his second film En la cama, has not stopped presenting, in his innovative cinematographic language, different proposals. This time it will be in Filmin with Private Messages one of the most risky films that in the Malaga Film Festival of 2022 won Biznaga de Plata for Best Editing and Best Male Cast Performance.
Bize’s cinema, which always revolves around themes of the couple here, widens the margin a little and comes with stories from the intimacy of a private space. How we are as mothers, fathers or children. Stories of pain, hope, love, or facing what was never faced. Visual notes that make up a film about our being and what we say when all certainties collapse.
My brothers dream awake, the second feature by Claudia Huaiquimilla, allows one to know one of the most suggestive voices and strong identity of the current Chilean panorama. This film, which had its World Premiere at the Locarno Film Festival, achieved a great harvest of awards as Best Fiction Film at the Guadalajara International Film Festival (Mexico) and Best Film and Audience Award at the Toulouse Latin Film Festival or Best Film of the Year (2021) by the Circle of Art Critics of Chile. In this case, they are two brothers who have been in a juvenile prison for a year, dreaming. The arrival of a rebellious young man offers a possible escape: the only door to make those dreams come true.
Roberto Doveris, is a director, producer and screenwriter who, with his second film Phantom Project, returns to mix languages creating very own universes with hints to the comic world as it was in his first film Las plantas that won the Grand Jury Prize in Generation 14 Plus. The path of Phantom Project Festivals began at the Rotterdam Festival and also achieved distribution in theatres in the United States. Pablo is a young actor who works as a simulated patient and in alternative therapies to earn a living. Suddenly, his housemate disappears, leaving him debts, the dog and a vest possessed by a ghost.
And lastly, a great sample of the vigor of the Chilean documentary world is found in The sky is red , first film by the young director Francina Carbonell, awarded feature film, both nationally and internationally that started at IDFA (Amsterdam) in 2020. The fire in the San Miguel prison (commune of Santiago de Chile) left 81 prisoners dead. Only some records of the incident were published. This documentary has full access to the judicial archives, and seeks to focus how and to what extent to observe the remains of that dark episode?
Don’t miss this opportunity to watch some of the best Chilean films at FIlmin!