Cinema Chile

Female producers and the future of Chilean cinema

May 26, 2021

What makes a producer? Is she born or does she forge the skills required for this job over time? Why does this role, which is so important in the film industry, still continue to be in the shadows for so many people? These and other key questions are answered and debated between laughs and exclusive anecdotes by three of the most outstanding women in Chilean cinema right now: Marcela Santibáñez, Rocío Jadue, and Alejandra García.

Join us for a new episode of CinemaChile Talks, the space for dialogue and reflection with national industry talents, and take part in the conversation on our social media platforms, YouTube, and on Spotify.

Get to know the producers:

Marcela Santibáñez (Micromundo) made history as the first female Chilean producer nominated for an Oscar for The Mole Agent by Maite Alberdi, with whom she also collaborated on films like Tea Time (Best Iberoamerican Documentary, Guadalajara 2014) and The Grown-Ups (Best Female Direction at IDFA, 2016). Her experience in executive production extends to the arthouse documentaries of Nicolás Molina, including Flow (Sheffield, 2018) and Gaucho Americano (Hotdocs, 2021), a film that was acclaimed by international critics following its world premiere at the beginning of this month.

Rocío Jadue (Head of Latin American Film at Fabula), has worked as a producer on films shown at the most prestigious festivals in the world, including Cannes, Venice, and Sundance, and on the first Chilean film to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, A Fantastic Woman by Sebastián Lelio. Her most recent premiere was a first feature that sent off a new Chilean voice into the international scene, Nobody Knows I’m Here by Gaspar Antillo (Best New Director at Tribeca, 2020). She is currently working with Christopher Murray (The Blind Christ, Venice 2016) on his third fiction film, The Sorcerers, in addition to a variety of talents from around Latin America.

On her part, Alejandra García has vast experience boosting production at Wood Producciones, in advertising as well as international series and arthouse films. She works closely with one of the most important, well known directors in the country, Andrés Wood. García is the producer behind Spider (Toronto, 2019), Wood’s seventh film, getting it to its nomination for the Goya in 2020. She is currently working with two distinguished female directors: Francisca Alegría (And the Whole Sky Fit in the Dead Cow’s Eye, Short Film Jury Award, Sundance 2017), who just finished filming The Cow that Sang a Song About the Future, and Manuela Martelli, who is pre-producing her first feature 1976 following the successful global run of her short films Apnea (Rencontres de Toulouse, 2010) and Marea de Tierra (Chile Factory, Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, 2015).

We invite you to meet our talented, visionary producers, in a talk moderated by executive director of CinemaChile, Constanza Arena, and get to know this intense and important labor carried out by women in the film industry.

Marcela Santibáñez, Rocio Jadue and Alejandra García