The great Chilean participation in the Cinélatino Rencontres Festival in Toulouse continues to surprise us. Interference, directed by Juan Carlos Soto, was one of the selected films in the official competition of Short Documentary Films.

After its premiere in Bafici (Argentina, 2021) the short film has had a great reception from the audience and specialized critics, touring different festivals during 2021 as Vienna Shorts; Sao Paulo International Short Film Festival and Jihlava international documentary film festival as well as participating in the IDFA Docs for Sale and Torino Short film markets. Interference has managed to awaken the ghost of a police and communications case that went unnoticed for decades in Chile.

Juan Carlos Soto

“The idea of the documentary was born from the investigation of the case of Jorge Henríquez’s murder in 1973. With the crew we traveled to Concepción, where the crime occurred, we interviewed the witnesses we managed to find, and we checked how the press of the time narrated such an event to the public opinion” says Juan Carlos.

Filming at the start of the pandemic has been one of the most complex situations. From the solitude of quarantine and narrated in first person, this documentary invites us to look at Chile’s past.

After filming his last short film Patria Dulce (San Antonio Independent Film Festival,  2017), the director has continued to create works that investigate the history of our country. This time, he decides to use the voice-over of Camila Garrido as the vehicle of the story.

Why do you decide to tell the story in first person? What do you want to portray with this solitary and intimate research?

The decision to show events from this point of view arises from the lack of it. The question we tried to answer during the shooting was: How can we tell this story with the tools and materials that we have available, how can we tell it without being able to go out to shoot, without further investigation, without being able to meet? all this posed a challenge that we had to solve from the creative side of us.

What do you want to convey by incorporating visual and audio elements that fragment the story?

The name of the short film is fundamental -Interference-. The fragments of the film seek to convey the unfinished processes presented by the investigation of the crime, the making of the documentary, the pandemic that changed our way of life. Somehow it’s all an interference.

“Interference”

PROCESSES THAT DEFINED THE INVESTIGATION

The investigation of the crime that occurred 47 years ago was confronted with different events such as the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced the research to be somewhat unfinished.

How was the process of continuing with the short film during the first months of confinement?

The lockdown was here and so the investigation had to stop. These two elements made the short film to be born. Research and the impossibility of completing it as a result of the pandemic.

The shooting process was cathartic, having the possibility to experiment with the different textures of the archive material, to film according to a goal helped us a lot to support the closure at the beginning of the pandemic.

What do you think or what do you expect the industry and global audience to react to at the Toulouse Film Festival?

In general in all the festivals that we have shown the film it has had very good reviews, in Toulouse we hope the same happens, we believe that the way in which the story is told has elements that attract attention and surprise. We hope it will be a great window to continue showing our work.