Discoveries from Chile World Cinema

A musician wanders through Valparaiso (Chile) streets in the searching of his lost debut tape.

A group of people perform local dances and prepare to have lunch outdoors in Playa Ancha.

The history of the Chilean labour and trade union movement up to 1933.

Documentary about Ricardo Liaño, once a businessman from the chilean boxing circles but with a very different life today. A life that Liaño seems to be escaping from.

In a small town in southern Chile, people are faced with the advent of modernity, a logging company and industrial fishing threatens the traditional life, not only by the environmental destruction that lies ahead. While this happens a woman takes refuge in his microcosm plant even when all the world hangs by a thread.

Marcelo Rossi, a 78-year-old Elvis impersonator, walks the streets of Chile as if he were the King himself. We follow him as he performs for a modern audience who’s not quite sure how to take him in. Marcelo’s love and criticism of the deceased rock star reveal his loneliness and the challenges he’s faced living on while Elvis has passed.

Months after experiencing abuse at the hands of a woman, Micaela (21) returns to the bathroom where the events took place. In an attempt to heal from her trauma, she retraces and reenacts the path she followed in the past, transforming her memory into an artistic act that reveals how the experience became etched into her subconscious.

A guy finds something in the woods. That something will start consuming him until an unexpected visit will judge his final fate...

Five friends embark on an adventure in a mysterious and unexplored world, where their friendship will be threatened by a dispute over the rule of Coltauco.

A documentary film set in Northern Chile that delves into the ancient Aymara culture. A couple carries seawater to the Andean peaks for a nearly forgotten ancestral ritual. The lives of women in the highlands and their migration to the city. A long prayer to the gods on a journey that runs counter to cultural disintegration.

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Ben Bravo Short Film

A documentary that explores the multifaceted life of National History Prize winner Mateo Martinic, from the public persona of the renowned historian, successful mayor, and tireless researcher, to a more intimate side unknown to the general public—as a husband, uncle, or neighbor—in a journey through a life dedicated to history.

MemoriaRocas uncovers the silenced history of a former Chilean detention and torture center, tracing the origins of state repression during Pinochet’s dictatorship through documentary experience.

A man watches his life flash before his eyes.

On 10 de Julio Street, Santiago, an alien machine stops in front of the facade of a hardware store.

A young man experiences a suffocating, surreal situation while suffering from sleep paralysis.

During a quiet afternoon, Victoria and her grandson talk about the beach, the ways they enjoy it, and the meaning of rest. In parallel, the young man reflects on what his grandmother means to him, discovering in that shared calm the depth of their bond.

Antumalen, a young Mapuche singer from Isleña, is organizing a festival with her community in the Lake Ranco area to defend free-flowing waters. Music will help them convey their sense of struggle to conserve the lake basin they inhabit.

In a totalitarian religious community, a docile, medicated young woman begins to hide a mysterious girl who awakens her repressed desires. What begins as an act of rebellion turns into a dark metamorphosis: under the harassment of her fanatical mother, the young woman confuses the real with the forbidden.

A girl decides to do get an abortion in the international women's day.

The film explores memory through technology. The filmmaker revisits his childhood bedroom using photogrammetry to reveal the impossibility of fully reconstructing memories, highlighting the distortions of both technology and memory.

In the process of tectonic formation, the plates fold and rise, creating mountain ranges. Cerro Blanco in Putaendo is a geographical accident. Cinema is another geographical accident.

The absence of a personal signature leads into a walk of repetitions as formative forces: a ping-pong between personal and Shanzhai geographies.

With anger and melancholy, the director describes her home in Chile. The former natural paradise is now covered by monotonous pine forests - alien, thirsty, waiting for the next fire.

In a city battered by capitalism, overwork, and loneliness, a group of Caribbean women recently arrived in Chile survive working at the popular “cafés con piernas” –literally “coffee with legs”–

This documentary tells the story of Jacqueline Roumeau, a playwright and theater director who, in the late 90s, began a theater workshop with female inmates at the Antofagasta Penitentiary Center. From this experience emerged the play 'Pavilion 2 – Sentenced Women', created after nine months of work and presented at the 'Santiago a Mil International Festival in 2000'. The project set a precedent for prison theater in Chile, showing how art can serve as a space for expression and personal reconstruction. The Roumeau Method revisits the process and outcomes of this initiative, highlighting the impact of theater within contexts of confinement. Beyond recounting a story, this audiovisual piece invites reflection on the use of art as a tool to transform realities and foster dialogue around justice and social reintegration.

Celebrating 50 years of the metro as a crucial social space, this documentary delves into its transformation from a simple means of transport to a vibrant hub of diversity and social connection. Through a rich tapestry of historical images, personal testimonies, and expert analysis, it showcases the metro's profound impact on urban life. The film also explores future plans and improvements, ensuring the metro remains a vital part of the community for years to come.

A family archive opens when a granddaughter discovers home-video footage from her grandfather’s 1995 journey to Beit Sahour. Over the next decade, she travels between Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile, recording conversations, reunions and silences that reveal how exile reshapes names, memories and loyalties. Objects, old tapes and family stories become clues linking Chile to Palestine, mapping a lineage scattered by migration yet bound by remembrance. Moving between present-day encounters and the images that began it all, the film pieces together a living portrait of kinship and loss. Intimate and quietly political, it shows how personal testimony can restore a history that borders tried to sever, and how memory, once set in motion, draws distant homes closer.

The Monkey with Its Tongue Out is an essay that interweaves personal memory, historical narrative, and philosophical reflection, using the zoo as a metaphor for the Technocene. Through a combination of documentary images and artificial intelligence, the work offers a critical look at the aestheticization of the artificial and new forms of observation mediated by algorithms.

An analog rotoscope animation that embodies a first-person voice constructed from the testimonies of sex workers in cafés con piernas in downtown Santiago. The short film unfolds a collective memory that stretches the boundaries between fantasy and reality, work and performance, body and commodity.

At the age of 34, Carlos was raped by two men. Now he teams up with an actor and a crew of queer filmmakers to recreate the incident, in a way to heal and regain the identity that was taken from him, while also sharing opinions and commons experiences regarding sexual violence in the LGBT+ community.

Between laughter, makeup, and confessions, a group of trans and travesti artists get ready to take the stage. In the intimacy of the dressing room, their humanity emerges — bonds, tenderness, and resistance.

Join KUINA and her friends for her first solo show at Sala Metronomo. This exclusive documentary takes you behind the scenes with intimate interviews, preparations and the incredible energy of the Live Show. Experience the magic of KUINA like never before.

During the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende, the marginality of housing in a sector of Santiago contrasts with the violence with which groups of right-wing youths confront, with their “September Plan”, the popular activism that unfolds in the central streets of the city of Santiago.

Report on the Santiago Zoo, located on San Cristóbal Hill. It is presented as a modern park, inaugurated in 1925. The focus then shifts to the zoo’s facilities and its main attractions, including the polar bear, seals, monkeys, and the beloved elephant Fresia.

Chilean national anthem performed by orchestra and tenor soloist, accompanied by images of the Chilean landscape and paintings depicting the independence.

In the heart of the Bolivian highlands, where the infinite white of the Salar de Uyuni meets the deep blue of the sky, an epic battle is unfolding. Ariel Flores, leader of the Río Grande community, faces a monumental challenge: preserving the ancient tradition of capturing and shearing wild vicuñas in a rapidly changing world. Climate change threatens the delicate balance of this unique ecosystem, while the exploitation of lithium, the largest reserve on the planet, attracts progress, but at what cost?

The Puritama Reserve is a territory of ancestral routes that today offers us clues as to how crucial this place was to the cultural and ecological identity of the region. Here, the word "preserve" takes on a double meaning: on the one hand, it speaks to us of the urgent need to protect a territory so that it continues to exist, and on the other, it invites us to reflect on how to allow people to approach and learn from it in a genuine way. This is not just a documentary about conservation, but a reflection on how the relationship between humans and the territory visited has changed, a testimony to what it was like to grow up there, and a reminder that sometimes, in order to ensure the existence of a place, there must be planned intervention.

In the midst of the pandemic, Valeria, a lonely elderly woman from Ovalle, fearful of the chaos outside, locks herself in her home. As she begins to lose her grip on reality, a man takes advantage of her vulnerability. During the protagonist's dreams, a little girl appears, searching for objects in her home. As irrationality takes over her life, the narrative transforms into a game between reality and fiction, leading her to face her fears.

Carmen, a peasant woman, seeks stability for her husband Carlos' health after he has an accident with an axe. One day, a bird bothers her, and she kills it with a slingshot. When her husband returns, he has a hole in the back of his neck, just like the bird. Carmen decides to burn both bodies after witnessing this irregularity, but Carlos assaults her, and in a quick act, she takes the same axe and cuts off his head.

Eric and Luis are two young influencers who record videos for the internet, in which they engage in an activity known as urban exploration. One night in October 2022, they decide to break into an abandoned apartment building in Santiago, Chile, a place known for rumors of disappearances and cult activities. The next day, they were reported missing. The only thing found was a video camera with footage inside.

Three of Us is the third installment in the saga that follows the mysterious deaths of elementary school students at a school in Talca. The group finally gets closer to the source of evil, unaware that the truth will only bring more deaths, betrayal, and lies. Power corrupts, and this lesson will be engraved in them with blood.