Discoveries from Chile World Cinema

During a school trip to the beach, Adrián experiences a glistening revelation after sparking a fight with Isma.

Santiago is a skeptical young man, but his friend Andrés is obsessed with a mysterious door in the forest that he says is capable of taking them to another world. One day, Andrés disappears without explanation, which will lead Santiago to cross the mysterious door to find him.

Decomposed images stimulated by a furious anthem and embedded voices speculate from the ruins for a possible pixel degradation.

Institutional documentary about the exploitation of Chuquicamata mineral that, as is usual in Balmaceda's work, highlights the social role of this industry and the context - human and physical - in which it operates.

After having ended their relationship due to distance, Camila calls Javiera on her birthday, with the intention of finding out if there is a possibility of getting back together.

Obsessed with her best friend, Clara (20 years old) sells her soul to the devil in the hope of winning his love.

Juan arrives at Andrée's apartment. Sara, the house keeper, receives him kindly. However, this place, once familiar, turns into an unknown world that begins to crumble during his stay.

An essay on the Peruvian-Chilean border created with footage found on the Internet.

In Santiago de Chile in 1979, at the height of General Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, Leppe had a five-point star shaved into his hair, invoking Marcel Duchamp’s star-shaped tonsure of 1919. In this video document, Leppe sits behind a transparent version of the Chilean flag, his head becoming the national emblem’s otherwise missing star.

During a casual party, Guillermo incites Jonathan to drink alcohol.

Annais, a high school student, runs away from home and goes to live with Leonardo, her 13-years-older-than-her ex-teacher. After being mistreated, she realizes that she needs to escape.

Olivia, a young woman suffering from bulimia nervosa, tries to survive the instability that her own disorder brings upon her.

A Short film about a cow that doesn't want to eat grass.

Hija de Perra was a transvestite artist who would become an icon of dissidence and a benchmark for Latin American underground, after she died in 2014. Multiple intimate and unpublished audiovisual footage, captured by her filmmaker best friend, reveal how this character came about. She experimented in music and film, wrote texts for the academy, and turned his cross-dressing into a political action, questioning gender and sexual identity.

Notes from a trip to the countryside landscape of central Chile (Maule). Dawn, men by a campfire, a boy prepares a basket to catch animals, a man with vine shoots on his back, men hunting rabbits, a man lying in bed with a Virgin by his side talks about his children who have departed, castration of a animal while the peasants cast carvings, songs and a procession of a Virgin with candles. A woman talks about Saint Sebastian who has cured her son. Horse race. Party at sunset with voices, Mexican music and boleros. Group of men in front of a campfire. (Info: Itinerary of Chilean Documentary Cinema 1900-1990, Alicia Vega)t

A man wakes up on a street, while trying to figure out why he woke up there, he runs into himself.

Nature is a divine mystery, born from a water ripple that breaks like a big-bang to create life as we know it; diverse beings that coexist in rivers, forests, oceans, mountains and even among the clouds. From the smallest to the largest, from the simplest to the most complex; all life meets around the spirit of water.

Blanca, a woman painter, will create a ritual to overcome her fear of the dark. Stuck in her paint shop unable to move forward, she must begin the rite. When the sun goes down, she prepares herself, she has to comply with only one rule, not to turn on the light. Between dreams and hallucinations she finds herself, her past, her childhood fantasies and her distorted thoughts. The night passes, Blanca must go through her fears to achieve her goal and thus discover a new version of herself in the dark.

A wealthy bachelor falls in love with a woman of the world, of dubious reputation.

A poet recites his verses. The people who listen to him, inspired by him, form the Spring Party, which later becomes the Spring Army. It is decided to eliminate possible opponents. The poet is considered an enemy and is shot.

Tomás and Marco are opposites in terms of their personality, buy they have to share the same classroom. When they get into a fight in the library, this allows them to tell each other their true feelings for the first time, but Tomás won’t let it last for long.

In 2016, Nicole Saavedra Bahamondes was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered for being a lesbian. The film evokes Nicole through the use of testimonies of her dear ones combined with images that portray the absence felt in the places that she inhabited.

12C, an 80-year-old man finds himself locked in a room full of old objects. There he remembers his search for happiness by chasing a small flower, in desolate places, with the help of the kind Pigmenta. Along the way he confronts Goliath the Tyrant, unleashing a beautiful tragedy.

Envío for Claudio Maturana, Santiago de Chile

In the surroundings of the renowned "Plaza Dignidad", different women recount their feelings, motivations and experiences during the first days of the social revolt in Chile. Building a common history in ground zero of the city of Santiago, during the insurrection that mobilized the country since October 18, 2019.

A separation that takes place a few weeks before the pandemic breaks out, will make geography and distances feel like they did in the times of our ancestors. Unpredictable, abrupt, and extensive, these landscapes sometimes external and some others internal, unleash a story that has not been revealed.

Record of a photo session and a performance—actions that seek to confront the fear of being perceived as “not man enough” in a macho and violent country. A queer body takes on the role of a macho footballer in a sort of calendar shoot or erotic casting, from the perspective of fetish. A biographical rewriting driven by desire, aiming to reframe and liberate identity.

Marcelo Muñoz Salcedo, a 40-year-old man from Santiago, reveals the physical and nutritional routine to which he submits in order to stand out in bodybuilding. Behind prejudices and methodical training, his story entails a humble and courageous openness.

Earth's evolution through geometric shapes.

November 25th, 2011. Participants of a demonstration against violence on women talk about their issues.

Students started revolting in 2011 in Chile. The streets are filled with demonstrations and this documentary tells us the history behind them.

After an earthquake, forgetting is survival, and the camera shouldn't record the destruction but what remains standing, because that's what will disappear next time. “Earth in Motion” is a journey around the perimeter of an epicenter in search of the seismic human, that kind of nation scattered across the world that lives on the edge of tectonic plates and lacks a national identity.

Told in a whisper, this quiet and diaristic film explores toxic masculinity through personal narrative, family legacy, and video games. El nombre de las cosas speaks aloud the unspoken and unspeakable, to give a name to traumas in order to heal them. Deeply poetic and disarmingly honest, director Diego Escobar uses his own story to address a widespread problem of inherited male aggression and all the ways families – and society – cope with and adapt to its toxicity.

A quarantined man begins to lose his sanity over a teapot.

Experimental film that establishes relationships of correspondence between light, abstract images and the rhythm of a percussion soundtrack. The result is a mysterious and hypnotizing work.

My uncle gave me his film archives. When I watched them, I realized that he had a comprehensive video diary, that he is a lover of images, and that he recorded everything as if he had been mandated by a public administrator to create memories. I see myself surrounded by them in his archives. They are my uncles, cousins and grandfathers – all policemen. My childhood with my family was surrounded by the PDI, Chile’s investigative police. Guns, badges, uniforms, gunshots. Almost all the men in my family are policemen. I look at my uncle’s images, at these ordinary men, even though I don’t know what that means. The story, the archives, the future, the violence and the police. Men and police as an inescapable relationship to think about.

After death, a specter wanders the city, revisiting the places once treaded in life, before returning home for a last time

Panorama de Santiago, is a video-performance classified as the first video art made in Chile (1981). In it, the artist runs for several minutes with his camera, making a tour from the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes to the stairs of the Biblioteca Nacional. The image oscillates and distorts as if the spectator were the one running frantically, an effect that -in the artist's words- seeks to speak of the Chilean dictatorial context at the beginning of the 1980s.

The history of Gaston Soublette, his life and work as a teacher and intellectual of his time and how it influenced ours, a group of students from Campus Oriente during the 80's and how it has influenced many others.

For Barbara Figueroa

for Ute Aurand, Berlin

Documentary that portrays the last year of operation of the old Valparaíso prison, closed in April 1999.

(01:50, 16 mm, color, silent) ENVÍO 8 (2009) for Helga Fanderl. Filmed in Paris.

In 1967, an upper-class woman constantly relives the crime of the murder of her husband along with his lover. She realizes that her thoughts have no turning back, generating a paranoia in her days.