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Pedro Pascal is Chilean by birth, American by circumstance, and internet royalty by demand. But the path from Santiago to superstardom was soaked in sacrifice, secrecy, and survival. Before he became the universally beloved face of The Mandalorian, the magnetic Oberyn Martell of Game of Thrones, or Marvel’s next Mr. Fantastic, Pascal was simply José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal, born on April 2, 1975, into political chaos.

His mother, Verónica Pascal Ureta, a child psychologist, and his father, José Balmaceda Riera, a fertility doctor, were loyal to then-socialist president Salvador Allende’s democratic vision. In a Reddit Ama, Pascal revealed:

My parents were liberals, they were very young at the time, I was just born, and they were Allende supporters, and you know, Chile at the time they were under military dictatorship, under Pinochet, and they were involved in the opposition movement against the military regime. Which really meant that they were against crimes against the people,...

An unprecedented co-production between Vietnam, Chile and Spain, “The Meeting” has found its director. The project was first announced at the San Sebastian Film Festival in 2023.

Arantxa Echevarría, winner of Spain’s Oscar equivalent, a Goya, for her feature debut “Carmen and Lola” and whose €8.3 million ($8.6 million) box office with political thriller “Undercover” (“La Infiltrada”) has made her the highest-grossing female director in Spain’s cinematic history, has boarded the co-production as its helmer and co-screenwriter.

The political thriller details a historical encounter between Chile’s doomed president Salvador Allende, whose downfall heralded the rise of the brutal military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in 1973.

“When I learned about ‘The Meeting,’ I knew that I was the one to tell this story. First because both characters, of vital and historical importance, were tremendously attractive. They both changed the geopolitics of the world, they admired each other and were, in many ways,...

Chile’s most bankable stars, Paulina Garcia (“Gloria”), Alfredo Castro (“El Conde”) and Luis Gnecco (“No”), are leading the voice cast in the upcoming animated feature “Winnipeg, Seeds of Hope.” Producer Sebastián Freund (“Dad to the Rescue”), who launched Rizco Content Sales with partner Ángel Zambrano last October at Iberseries, has pounced on the international streaming rights to the toon and boarded as an executive producer.

“Securing the international streaming rights for this vital and emblematic project, which portrays a significant chapter in the shared history of Chile, Spain, and Argentina, marks a major milestone for our agency and the global market for diverse audiences,” said Freund, who is attending Ventana Sur where the project participates in the annual event’s Animation! Wip section.

Co-produced by Spain’s La Ballesta and Dibulitoon Studio, Chile’s El Otro Film, and Argentina’s Malabar Prods, “Winnipeg” unfolds through the reflections of 86-year-old Julia,...

With Mipcom in full swing, Spain’s Onza Distribution – with offices in Madrid and Miami – has cemented sales to Portugal, Romania, Croatia, Latvia and Mozambique for a slew of key titles.

Chilean drama “Allende, The Thousand Days,” Onza-produced thriller “Heartless” and its comedy “Traffic Jam” as well as acclaimed Italian mini-series “Flowers Over the Inferno” are among productions included in deals alongside telenovelas “Cacao,” “The Value of Life” and “Forever.” Portugal’s Rtp and Romania’s Antenaplay go all-in, with several acquisitions each.

Onza’s “Heartless,” an eight-episode psychological thriller which hit the No. 2 slot on Prime Video Spain upon its release, was acquired by Portugal’s public broadcaster Rtp and streamer Antenaplay, an arm of Romania’s Antena TV Group. The narrative follows a diabolical criminal targeting elite businessmen in Madrid, capturing and cruelly torturing them, investigators hot on the case.

“Allende, The Thousand Days” was swooped on...

A present-tense record of nation-splitting turmoil, Patricio Guzmán’s monumental documentary The Battle of Chile remains a landmark of activist cinema. Chronicling the events leading to the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist regime by a conservative military coup, it offers a staggering blend of history and narrative.

“The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie,” the first of the film’s three parts, opens in the excitement of the 1970 election and closes in terror, as the street clashes between workers, students, and soldiers yield to bullets. Violence intensifies in the second part (“The Coup d’Etat”) as Allende’s government is besieged by business-controlled strikes and finally taken down by the Nixon/Kissinger-backed 1973 junta that placed Augusto Pinochet in power.

Edited from bits of often risky coverage taken during the period, the first two parts have the force of an early Roberto Rossellini picture. Attuned to the active political engagement of the Chilean people,...

Chile’s Los Bunkers, one of the most admired of Latin America’s rock bands, has signed on to score “The Last Witness” (“El Ultimo Testigo”), a doc feature portrait of Luis Poirot, a Chilean photographer who has snapped many key events and figures in the country’s history from Salvador Allende to the estallido outburst of social protests in 2019, and beyond.

Some of Poirot’s earliest photos, all black and white, capture Allende on his successful 1959 presidential campaign trail, Poirot appointed its official photographer. He took illicit shots of Chile’s presidential Palacio de la Moneda days after Allende died there in a military coup d’etat, its windows gutted by Chilean Air Force strafing. He also snapped Nobel prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda at his Isla Negra beachside home.

Directed by Catalan documentarian-journalist Francesc Relea (“Serrat y Sabina: el símbolo y el cuate”), “The Last Witness” captures Poirot shooting...

Francesc Relea’s “The Last Witness,” Alejandra Carpio’s “Concert for a Single Voice” and Martín Boulocq’s “Criminal Body” feature in an expanded Sanfic Industria Ibero-American Work In Progress, one of the industry centerpieces at the 20th Santiago Intl. Film Festival in Chile.

Usually eight entries, titles were increased to 10 this year, Gabriela Sandoval, Sanfic Industry told Variety, given that submissions were up 50% on 2023.

That reflects the post-pandemic recovery of production in Latin America, plus the ever larger appeal of profile at Sanfic Industria, the key summer film industry event in the region.

With Sanfic Industria’s Sanfic Morbido Lab showcasing the powerful build in genre across Spain and Latin America, including this year new projects from Caye Casas and Guillermo Amoedo, Sanfic Ibero-American Wip has genre movies, whether sci-fi “The Clearing” or the movie shot in “Criminal Body.”

Featuring five women directors, the Ibero-American Wip underscores the last-decade...

Every year, apart from its commitment to experimental forms, it’s Marseille’s very social contradictions that are most striking about the Festival international de cinéma de Marseille, or FIDMarseille. This is a film festival experience marked by the most ghastly signs of inequality, which one necessarily stumbles upon while schlepping from cinema to cinema: destitution, dillapitation, vandalism, garbage, class divisions. White people in air-conditioned screening rooms versus the racialized locals in the sorching heat outside. The city’s dilapidated walls are plastered with posters about the upcoming elections and Gaza.

It isn’t without interest, then, that some of the most memorable films from this year’s selection come from a context of institutional devastation, albeit from the other side of the world. That is, South America, where times of prosperity and democracy are like interludes between one coup d’état or authoritarian delirium and the next. Perhaps FIDMarseille...

In a triumphant night for Spain, J.A. Bayona’s Oscar-nominated “Society of the Snow” swept the top prizes at Platino Xcaret, named after the venue of the annual Platino Awards this year, which took place at the Xcaret Park, Riviera Maya, Mexico.

Argentina cinema’s plight, exacerbated by far-right president Javier Milei’s closure of its film institute, Incaa, was also on many people’s minds.

Citing veteran Argentine filmmaker Adolfo Aristarain as one of his inspirations, Bayona said upon receiving his best director award: “Argentina, we are here standing by your side, you’re not alone.”

Bayona’s harrowing account of the 1972 Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash, from which only 16 people survived after 72 days stranded in the Andes, became Netflix’s second most-viewed non-English film of all time. “I wouldn’t be here without the book that Pablo Vierci wrote,” said Bayona, who also thanked his cast and crew,...

Miami-based Mge Media has scooped up international distribution rights to Katherina Harder’s feature debut, “La Pérgola de las Flores,” produced by Parox, the Chilean producer of mini-series “Allende, The Thousand Days” (“Los mil días de Allende”), which is nominated for three Premios Platino.

The prestigious Ibero-American awards event takes place April 20 in Cancun, Mexico where “Allende…” has been nominated for best series, best actor for Alfredo Castro, who plays the doomed socialist president Salvador Allende, and best actress for Aline Kuppenheim.

Written by Parox producer and showrunner Leonora González and Catalina Calcagni, “La Pérgola de las Flores” is an adaptation of the wildly popular 1960 stage musical that has enthralled three generations in Chile. “Even our grandparents know the lyrics by heart, it’s our ‘Westside Story,’” said Parox producer Sergio Gandara who will be attending the Premios Platino along with Kuppenheim and González, who also created and showran “Allende…...

Pascal's early career involved small roles in TV shows until landing his breakout role as Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones. His stellar performance in Game of Thrones led to a leading role in Narcos and eventually The Mandalorian, showcasing his range as an actor. Pascal's career continues to soar with upcoming projects, including starring as Reed Richards in the McU's Fantastic Four reboot.

Pedro Pascal is a Chilean-American actor who has rapidly become a household name. Pascal's mother, Veronica Pascal, was a child psychologist, and his father, Jose Balmaceda, was a fertility doctor. His parents participated in a resistance group in Chile, and his mother was the cousin of the nephew of the socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende. Because of their rebellion against the dictatorship, Pascal's family moved to the United States when he was only nine months old.

Pascal started acting at a young age with local theater and school plays,...

Chile-based Escala Humana Prods., led by Sebastián Brahm, is developing an ambitious English-language series titled “Golpe” about a little-known story behind the CIA’s involvement in the fall of Chile’s first Socialist president, Salvador Allende.

Intended for a U.S. audience and based on declassified U.S. government documents, the first season of the historical crime drama series, titled “The Abduction of a Commander-in-Chief,” will dramatize the CIA’s covert attempt to trigger a coup before Marxist candidate Salvador Allende assumes power in 1970 Chile and a CIA officer’s initial instinct to undermine it.

“It pits traditional corporate interest in U.S. interventionism against the ultra-liberal disciples of Milton Friedman that would later run the show, to whom the chaos of a communist regime was a necessary step before full-scale privatization; Chile was a global test case and ‘Golpe’ will tell the story,” said Brahm, adding that he reviewed...

Underscoring its historical importance, a further production marking the 50th death anniversary of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende could well be in the works. The historical drama, provisionally titled “The Meeting,” details a historical encounter between the doomed president, whose downfall heralded the rise of the infamous military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in 1973.

Producers Patricio Ochoa of Chile’s La Merced Prods., Cristóbal Sotomayor of Twentyfour Seven, Spain and U.S.-based executive producer Hebe Tabachnik of Lokro Production are in talks with potential production partners in Vietnam and France and with possible international sales agents.

Gonzalo Maza, the screenwriter behind Chile’s Oscar-winning “A Fantastic Woman” is attached as a script doctor to the screenplay penned by filmmaker-writer Antonio Luco.

“The Meeting” relates the fateful 1969 meeting between Allende, who was then Chile’s Senate president, and Vietnam’s President Ho Chi Minh, a frail 79 and on his last days.

Spain’s Onza Distribution, with offices in Madrid and Miami, has seized international rights to mini-series “Allende, the Thousand Days,” released this year to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Chile’s first socialist president, Salvador Allende, and sadly, the military coup that kickstarted general Augusto Pinochet’s brutal regime.

Lead produced by Chile’s Parox, in collaboration with Mediterraneo Media Entertainment, Aleph Media, 1010 Mente Colectiva and HD Argentina, the mini-series premiered Sept. 7 on Chile’s Tvn, which reported stellar audience ratings.

The four one-hour episode series is the first fictional series attempt to explore the period of time when Allende’s Popular Unity party was in power and the challenges it faced. It is told from the point of view of a fictitious Spanish political science student who eventually becomes Allende’s closest advisor.

Allende, played by an unrecognizable Alfredo Castro (“El Conde”), is front and center...

A sardonic view of Popular Unity, the left-wing alliance once led by the Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende, Raul Ruiz’s docu-fiction hybrid, “Socialist Realism,” world premiered at the San Sebastian Film Festival on Sept 23, 50 years after the prolific filmmaker was forced to abandon it.

It finally unspools after his widow, filmmaker-editor Valeria Sarmiento, with the backing of actress-helmer Chamila Rodríguez’s Poetastros production company, rescued and reconstructed the film.

Both Sarmiento and Rodríguez are in San Sebastian to present the pic.

Ruiz, who died in 2011, was forced to flee the brutal 1973 coup d’état in his country and was never able to finish editing the hybrid feature.

What some pundits hailed as one of the filmmaker’s “most ambitious and political works” is made up of a series of short stories where two contrasting worlds collide, that of the workers and the bourgeois intellectual supporters of the Popular Unity coalition.

Movies about movies tend to be as sentimental as Cinema Paradiso, the all-time tearjerker in the genre, or as caustic as the recent Babylon. But Lone Scherfig finds a fine balance between love of movies and the harsh wider world in The Movie Teller, a beautifully made coming-of-age film about Maria Margarita, who acts out the Hollywood movies she has seen at the local cinema in her small mining town. Set in the Chilean desert in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the drama benefits greatly from the sure hand and clear eye Scherfig has brought to her best films, other period pieces including An Education (2009) and Their Finest (2016). All that can’t quite make up for the rocky screenplay, though.

The story is adapted from the Chilean writer Hernan Rivera Letelier’s 2009 novel. The first version of the screenplay was tackled years ago by the Brazilian director Walter Salles,...

Born on Nov. 25, 1915, Augusto José Ramón Pinochet would rise through the ranks of the Chilean military and, having become commander-in-chief of the nation’s army, lead a coup against the country’s president Salvador Allende in 1973. This would kick off Pinochet’s political reign — and reign of terror — for the next 17 years. He’d escape persecution for the countless crimes committed during his regime and was unrepentant about his dictatorship (what were mass graves of dissidents but more “efficient ways of burials?”) up until his death in 2006.

This is what the history books tell us.

For Chileans, September 11th has an entirely different meaning than it does for Americans. For the latter, September 11th refers to the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the nearly 3,000 lives lost. For the former, September 11th refers to the date in 1973 when Augusto Pinochet, a CIA-backed army general and chief-of-staff, overthrew the rightfully, democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in a military coup. Pinochet and his supporters instituted a reign of terror, suppression, and repression that lasted almost two decades. “The disappeared,” as political dissidents and opponents of the Pinochet regime who vanished permanently into internment camps were called, numbered approximately three thousand. Left-leaning liberals, academics, and government workers who didn’t go into exile lived...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Comandante.Beyond the Venice Film Festival's habitual paucity of female filmmakers, the most striking aspect of this year’s lineup was its astounding number of biopics. Granted, the genre has always been a staple of the fest, which under artistic director Alberto Barbera has effectively metastasized into a launchpad for Hollywood’s awards race. But the inclusion of so many in its eightieth edition was nonetheless remarkable. The official competition alone was home to six—among them big studio projects like Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Michael Mann’s Ferrari—to say nothing of all those slotted in the parallel sidebars, from Quentin Dupieux’s fittingly surrealist Daaaaaali! to Neo Sora’s Ryuichi Sakamoto—Opus. Beyond the industry’s flirtations with the genre for its bona fide commercial potential, what accounts for our ongoing fascination with biopics is perhaps their promises of identification and revelation: in charting the lives of extraordinary figures,...

The Augusto Pinochet regime, which ruled Chile under an oppressive thumb with unspeakable human rights violations from 1973 to 1990, following the coup d’état that ousted Socialist president Salvador Allende, has been the subject of countless screen dramas. That includes a loose trilogy by Pablo Larraín, comprised of Tony Manero, Post Mortem and No, all of which observed the dictatorship from unique angles. But even by the director’s own distinctive standards, his return to the subject is a wild leap into irreverent originality, reimagining the deposed tyrant as a 250-year-old vampire on the verge of relinquishing eternal life.

Shot in ravishingly textured, crepuscular black and white by the great Ed Lachman, the Netflix film (opening Sept. 8 in theaters before streaming from Sept. 15) is as visually intoxicating and atmospheric as it is provocative, liberally mixing political satire with dark comedy and horror while examining a grim history that seems doomed to keep repeating itself.

Putting the blackened, flash-frozen heart of Chile’s undead past into a blender, blitzing it to a lumpen pulp and guzzling down the result with grimly comic relish, Pablo Larraín, after his Hollywood forays with “Spencer” and “Jackie,” returns to his home turf and finds it bleeding out from a mysterious two-hole puncture on its neck. “El Conde” — the Chilean director’s uncategorizably bizarre riff on vampire mythos, cronyist corruption and the more mundane horror that is a squabbling family divvying up their patriarchal inheritance while the patriarch is still around — coils itself around an inventively nasty literalization of the idea that the evil that men does lives after them. Those words, spoken over Caesar’s body in “Julius Caesar,” sparked a war that ended a republic. With his iteration, Larraín aims to do his part in delivering a republic instead, bringing his elegantly foul exercise in gallows humor to bear,...

Everyone knows that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died in December 2006 at the age of 91, more than 30 years after he seized power from Salvador Allende in a coup d’état that was followed by censorship, torture, mass internments, and forced disappearances at the pleasure of an unelected regime that drained the country of its lifeblood for generations to come. What Pablo Larraín’s cheeky and grotesque “El Conde” (or “The Count”) presupposes is… what if he didn’t?

Directly addressing a figure whose dark shadow has fringed some of the director’s previous work, this fanged satire about the persistence of evil imagines that Pinochet is still alive and kicking. Or, more accurately: undead and loathing it. In Larraín’s conception, Pinochet is a 250-year-old vampire who first developed his lust for blood during the French Revolution, during which he so fetishized Marie Antoinette’s indifference towards the common man that...

On September 11, 1973, Chilean military commander Agosto Pinochet orchestrated a coup and seized power over President Salvador Allende. Nearly 50 years later, the undead vampire Pinochet has absconded to the countryside, having faked his death after the end of his regime.

It didn’t quite happen that way, but it’s the fantastic twist of director Pablo Larraín’s gothic satire “El Conde” (“The Count”), the filmmaker’s latest and most ambitious response to the lingering trauma of the Pinochet years. A black-and-white blend of atmospheric silent-era horror and dark humor, the movie confronts the impact of the Pinochet years by transforming the man into a literal bloodsucker who drained the life out of his country.

The Netflix production, which premieres in competition at the Venice Film Festival later this month, adds a provocative new angle to Chile’s relationship with its former ruler. The scope of that history is so vast...

Toledo, Spain — At this month’s Annecy, France’s Canal+, France Télévisions and even Gulli delighted the business by unveiling new production slates which boasted some of the boldest projects being brought to market at the French festival.

At one and the same time, major European broadcasters, the BBC and France Télévisions again, were talking up their streaming services at Annecy.

These used to be treated as a complement to their linear offering. Now it’s increasingly the other way round.

Annecy, of course, is animation. But could the same market forces be at work in live action TV and in Spain?

More than a hint of a step-by-step revolution at work at Rtve, Spain’s public broadcaster, was sensed at an upbeat showcase on Wednesday.

Moderated by José Pastor, Rtve’s director of film and fiction, the show-case, Rtve Co-Productions on Board, featured three shows, “Allende, the Thousand Days,...

Exclusive: Veteran Actor Alfredo Castro is in the middle of what could be described as a mid-career boom, but he doesn’t think it’ll bring him many plaudits in his native country.

“I think I will have to leave Chile,” Castro joked as he sat down with Deadline virtually from Santiago.

Last month, Castro was out in Cannes with The Settlers (Los Colonos), a tight and shrewd historical drama from Felipe Gálvez. Set in Chile at the beginning of the 20th century, the pic follows a wealthy landowner, played by Castro, who hires three horsemen to mark out the perimeter of his extensive property and open a route to the Atlantic Ocean across vast Patagonia. The expedition, composed of a young Chilean mestizo, an American mercenary, and led by a reckless British lieutenant, soon turns into a “civilizing” raid against Chile’s indigenous population.

Patricio Guzmán’s staggering documentary examines popular protest that swept through Chile in 2019, when hundreds of thousands of people – chiefly young women – took to the streets of Santiago

The 100th birthday of Henry Kissinger makes this a gruesomely appropriate moment to see the latest movie from Chilean film-maker Patricio Guzmán, about the rage-filled public estallido, or “outburst”, in 2019: the giant protest about inequality and injustice, triggered by a price increase on the subway, that finally forced a change of government in the country.

Guzmán has documented Chile’s trials since the 1973 coup (encouraged by Kissinger) which unseated the democratically elected Salvador Allende and installed the brutally oppressive client-state rule of Gen Augusto Pinochet, whose eventual departure in 1990 heralded a supposed transition – or transition back – to democracy but actually left the country in an agonised state of denial about the tyranny in which so many had been complicit. This is...

Top Chilean fiction house Parox, producer of “Invisible Heroes,” has kick-started principal photography on international co-production “Los mil días de Allende”, a historical drama mini-series about the last three years in the life of Chilean President Salvador Allende.

Alfredo Castro – one of Latin America’s most respected actors and a Pablo Larraín regular, star of films such as “Karnawal” and “El Club” – leads the mini-series cast as Allende; Benjamín Vicuña plays Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

The four-episode, 55-minute fiction drama shoot is taking place entirely in Chile, lensing from May 15 for two months, under “Besieged” and “Inés of My Soul” director Nicolás Acuña.

Leonora González and Sergio Gándara, Parox co-founders, are respectively the mini-series’ showrunner and producer.

A Chile-Spain-Argentina co-production, “Allende, the Thousand Days” teams Spain’s Mediterráneo Media Entertainment and Argentine companies Aleph, Mente Colectiva and HD Argentina.

Chilean public broadcaster Tvn, Spanish nationwide group Rtve and Argentina’s...

It’s said that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, but in the case of Carmen (Aline Küppenheim), the protagonist of Manuela Martelli’s Chile ’76, paranoia may be a self-fulfilling prophesy. After all, as its title indicates, the film is set during Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing military dictatorship, three years after the coup that toppled Salvador Allende’s democratically elected left‐wing Popular Unity Government.

Carmen is a young grandmother, wife of a hospital administrator (Alejandro Goic), and former Red Cross nurse. She lives a complacent bourgeois life, insulated from anti-communist suspicion but not from her own neuroses, which she self-medicates with a steady intake of pills, alcohol, and cigarettes. When she and her family pay a visit to their seaside vacation house, the local priest, Father Sanchez (Hugo Medina), recruits her to secretly nurse a communist insurgent, Elías (Nicolás Sepúlveda...

“If they find me here, they will torture me:” In September of 1973, the armed forces of Chile, led by U.S.-backed General Augusto Pinochet, staged a coup d’etat that overthrew Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president. Pinochet’s dictatorship would be brutal, as thousands of dissidents were either kidnapped or killed in the years to come. This dark era in Latin American politics is the backdrop of “Chile ’76,” the debut feature film from young Chilean filmmaker Manuela Martelli.

Continue reading ‘Chile ‘76’ Trailer: Political Thriller from Kino Lorber Is An Intimate Portrait of Life Under A Brutal Dictatorship at The Playlist.

Patricio Guzmán’s documentary juxtaposes historical chaos with the eternal beauty of the mountain range that surrounds Santiago

Documentary film-maker Patricio Guzmán returns to his great and tragic theme of exile – from his Chilean homeland, from his past, from a world that made a certain sort of sense before the brutal 1973 coup which unseated Salvador Allende and introduced a military despotism whose ugly consequences have never been resolved there. Like his 2012 film Nostalgia for the Light, which reflected on the vast beauty of the Atacama desert in central Chile and thegreat Paranal observatory, contrasted with the shabby dishonour of 73, The Cordillera of Dreams again finds the film-maker juxtaposing the historical chaos and despair with the eternal beauty and mystery of the landscape: in this case, the awe-inspiring “cordillera” or Andean mountain range that surrounds his home town of Santiago.

Guzmán fled Chile soon after the coup and the cordillera’s...

“Memory is our best weapon,” says Valentina Miranda, a young student and fierce activist, when interviewed by veteran documentarian Patricio Guzmán about the massive protests that united the Chilean population in 2019, leading to the redrafting of the country’s longstanding constitution. Her concise but truthful statement in turn encapsulates what the director has pursued his entire career behind the camera: immortalizing the present so it’s not forgotten.

The intergenerational exchange between Miranda and Guzmán is one of many in his organically comprehensive and elegantly galvanizing new non-fiction piece “My Imaginary Country” (“Mi país imaginario”), which debuted out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.

Footage of cheerful crowds celebrating the victory of Salvador Allende in the 1970 presidential election opens the film on a melancholic note. Soon Guzmán’s voice reminds us that, only three years later, a coup d’état would install dictator Augusto Pinochet in power.

The Locarno Film Festival will pay tribute to Greek-French director Costa-Gavras with its Pardo alla carriera lifetime achievement award.

The longtime Paris-based master of politically engaged cinema will be on hand at the prominent Swiss fest dedicated to indie filmmaking to receive the prize during a ceremony on its Piazza Grande square on Aug. 11 followed by an audience-led conversation the next day.

Locarno will also host screenings of two of Costa Gravras’ lesser known films: “Un homme de trop” (“Shock Troops”) from 1967, and “Compartiment tueurs” (“The Sleeping Car Murders”), which is his 1965 debut feature.

In a career spanning nearly 60 years, Costa-Gavras — which is short for Konstantinos Gavras — has become known for highly political works, such as 1969’s “Z,” about the military’s coup d’etat in Greece, which won the foreign film Oscar in 1969; and 1982’s “Missing,” which starred Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek in a story inspired by the...

It’s a new dawn for Chile’s audiovisual industry. When Gabriel Boric, Chile’s youngest (at 35) and most left-leaning president since Salvador Allende, was elected in December, his pledge to more than double the state’s contribution to the arts was greeted with great fanfare.

After all, Chile’s prodigious film output this past decade has been remarkable despite the scant public support it has received.

“If everything we have achieved in the last 10 years was done with so little money, imagine what we can achieve with an increase in audiovisual funding!” says Constanza Arena, executive director of Chile’s film promotion org, CinemaChile.

In recent years, Chile has triumphed at the Oscars, starting when Pablo Larraín’s “No” was nominated for international feature in 2012, and culminating in an Oscar win for Sebastian Lelio’s “A Fantastic Woman” in 2017. Last Academy Awards season, Maite Alberdi’s documentary “The Mole Agent...

Paul Thomas Anderson grew up in the San Fernando Valley, which played an important role in his 1997 breakthrough film “Boogie Nights,” which looked at Valley’s porn industry during the ‘70s and 80s. In his new United Artists release “Licorice Pizza,” Anderson returns to the Sfv for a nostalgia-tinged comedy-of-age story set in 1973 starring Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim. Both young performers received strong notices with the L.A. Times’ Justin Chang declaring Haim as the true star of “this boisterous, bighearted movie and its raison d’être.” And Bradley Cooper has earned positive notices for his funny turn as hairdresser turned film producer Jon Peters, who ironically was a producer on Cooper’s 2018 “A Star is Born.”

So, what was the world like in 1973? It was the year of Watergate, Roe Vs. Wade and “The Exorcist” hitting the big screen. Let’s travel back almost half a century to look at the top films,...

Above: Porto FrancoOne could argue that cinema and ideology are intrinsically linked with each other, even when one regards even the most menial, apparently wholly apolitical films, such as comedies and romantic dramas. But what happens to said cinema when this link is brutally severed by a severely traumatic event, such as a regime change? How does this modulate the understanding of cinema in relation to the two main, and apparently opposite concepts that usually applied to political readings: propaganda and subversion? And how does regime change affect ulterior output and cinematic canons, especially if the fallen regime was actively involved in censorship and oppression of free speech?The history of various national cinemas across the second half of the 20th century, correlated with the histories of various dictatorships which professed loyalties to both sides of the political spectrum, may shed valuable insights to the above questions. By and large,...

With his new political thriller “Arana” (“Spider”), Chile’s Andres Wood traces the roots of the ultra-nationalist movement that led to Salvador Allende’s downfall and the rise of military dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

He represents Chile at the Best International Feature Oscar race for the third time with “Araña.”

The drama turns on Inés, Justo and Gerardo who belong to an extreme nationalist group that aims to overthrow Allende’s Marxist government in the early 70s. Amid the fervor of this conflict, they get entangled in a love triangle and commit a political crime that separates Gerardo from the other two until he reappears 40 years later, bent on reviving the nationalist cause.

Wood made his stamp on the international festival circuit with a string of hits, including “Machuca,” which premiered at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in 2004; “La Fiebre del Loco (2001), Official Selection at the a Venice and Toronto Film Festivals...

Mexico City — A crossroads for the film industries of Mexico, the U.S. and Canada, Los Cabos Intl. Film Festival opens its doors on Wednesday, Nov. 13 with a lineup which takes on board hot-button issues – gender, violence in Mexico, the impact of global platforms – as the Festival consolidates its status as a Mexican new talent platform. 10 Takes on the 2019 edition:

1.Robert De Niro, Gaston Pavlovich And ’The Irishman’

Robert De Niro will attend Los Cabos’ Film Festival’s Opening Ceremony on Wednesday for a gala screening of “The Irishman.” The movie’s presence at Los Cabos can be seen as part thanks to its cinematographer. Mexico’s Rodrigo Prieto, and above all to its Mexican producer, Gastón Pavlovich. Already producer of Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” who stuck with “The Irishman,” through thick and thin as it turned from a Paramount/Stx movie to an Oscar-contending Netflix original.

2.Buzzy Projects

Of Mexican titles,...

The day Chilean director Andrés Wood went to America to promote his film, “Spider,” which is Chile’s Oscar submission this year, his country erupted in protests amid a massive and violent time of political upheaval.

What started as anger over a surge in the price of subway fare was just the breaking point in the Chilean populace’s frustration with its government over economic inequality. People took to the streets for days, a state of national emergency was declared, and protestors accused the military of using excessive force.

It all echoes the turbulent time depicted in Wood’s film “Spider,” which is set in both the modern-day and the early ’70s, just before Chile’s Marxist president Salvador Allende was deposed in a coup and replaced with the dictator Augusto Pinochet. Watching and discussing the film as part of TheWrap’s Awards and Foreign Screening Series on Wednesday night,...

Written by the legendary Chilean folk singer Víctor Jara, the 1971 song, “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz,” or “The Right to Live in Peace,” was originally dedicated to Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh, as the United States waged war in Vietnam. By 1973, Chile, too, would be at war; following a military coup that overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende, General Augusto Pinochet would assume power until 1990. By Pinochet’s orders, Jara was held prisoner in a football stadium, where along with thousands of other civilians, he was tortured and murdered by soldiers.

Personal reflection on native Santiago concludes trilogy.

Icarus Films has picked up North American rights from Pyramide International to Patricio Guzmán’s The Cordillera Of Dreams ahead of its North American premiere in Toronto.

French-Chilean co-production Cordillera earned a special metion among the documentary selections in Cannes this year. It profiles the France-based filmmaker’s native Santiago – a place he left after the Augusto Pinochet regime seized power in 1973 – and is a personal reflection that also pays homage to the mountain range surrounding the city.

The film from Atacama Productions is the final instalment in a trilogy encompassing Nostalgia For The Light...

Personal reflection of native Santiago concludes trilogy.

Icarus Films has picked up North American rights from Pyramide International to Patricio Guzmán’s The Cordillera Of Dreams ahead of its North American premiere in Toronto.

French-Chilean co-production Cordillera shared the Golden Eye Award for best documentary in Cannes in May. It profiles the France-based filmmaker’s native Santiago – a place he left after the Augusto Pinochet regime seized power in 1973 – and is a personal reflection that also pays homage to the mountain range surrounding the city.

The film is the final instalment in a trilogy encompassing Nostalgia For The Light (2010) and...

Pamplona, Spain — In an early and memorable dramatic beat in “Invisible Heroes,” a Original Series of Finnish broadcaster Yle, in partnership with Chilean network Chilevision, the former head of international trade under Chile’s Salvador Allende clambers over the garden wall of the chalet of a Finnish diplomat to seek asylum after Augusto Pinochet’s bloody 1973 military coup.

Suitcase in hand, he looses his footing,, and falls straight into Tapani Brotherus’ swimming pool.

Much admired at MipTV by those who caught it, “Invisible Heroes” opened to warm applause on Monday night at Conecta Fiction, the world’s foremost Europe-Latin America TV co-production forum, which runs June.17-20 in Pamplona, Northern Spain.

Chile is one of Conecta Fiction’s two 2019 countries in focus. If the quality on paper of some of its projects is born out by their pitches, in public events or one-to-one meetings, it will also be one of its stars.

Chile’s storied tradition in documentary filmmaking dates as far back as 1900 when its first recorded documentary short “Las Carreras del Viña del Mar” tracked its annual horse race derby in the coastal town of Viña del Mar. Its director remains anonymous as were those of many docs in the early part of the century.

It is perhaps Chile’s most prominent documentary filmmaker, Patricio Guzman, who, in his bid to sustain the memory of Chile’s dark history with such compelling gems as three-part “The Battle of Chile,” has helped keep the country’s documentary tradition as vibrant and renowned as it is now.

“A country without documentaries is like a family without photo albums,” he has said.

Now 77, Guzman has a new doc, “The Cordillera of Dreams,” playing at the Special Screening at Cannes.

A plethora of non-fiction films about Chile’s political history continue to be made,...

‘El Gol Mas Triste’ is set in 1973.

Chilean producer Macarena López has signed a deal with a German co-production partner at Efm on the $1.5m Chilean World Cup football team drama El Gol Más Triste (The Saddest Goal) to star Chile’s Luis Gnecco (Neruda) and Alfredo Castro (Tony Manero).

Germany’s Hanfgarn & Ufer Filmproduktion has come on board, alongside lead producer López’ Chilean outfit Manufactura de Películas, Michel Franco’s Lucia Films from Mexico, Big Bonsai from Brazil, and Manny Films from France.

Sergio Castro will direct the 1973-set story, which takes place in Chile in the final days...

This documentary about Rolls-Royce workers in the 70s is poignant and painful story of the power of unions

This heartfelt documentary from Felipe Bustos Sierra is about the decency and moral courage of a group of Scottish Rolls-Royce workers and trade unionists. In 1974 the men downed tools, refusing to repair jet engines for the Chilean air force in protest against the bloody military coup that had toppled the government of Salvador Allende. Bob Fulton, a quick-witted shop steward, spotted that the engines were Chilean and “blacked” them, meaning that they were in dispute and couldn’t be touched. “He was a guy who was difficult for the management to handle,” a colleague chuckles.

The workers didn’t know it at the time, but the engines rusting in crates outside their factory in East Kilbride were from the planes that dropped bombs on the presidential palace a year earlier. Sierra is...

On Alex Anwandter’s critically adored 2016 album, Amiga, the Chilean singer-songwriter played the role of a troubled patriot, confronting issues of sexuality and gender in the context of Chile’s social and political past and present. That same year, he also released his first film, Nunca Vas a Estar Solo (You’ll Never Be Alone) — a drama inspired by the case of Daniel Zamudio, a young Chilean man murdered for being gay. “We have a great consciousness in Chile,” Anwandter tells Rolling Stone over the phone. “We’re very intense,...

Palme d'Or-winning director Nanni Moretti will unveil his latest film, Santiago, Italia as the closing night gala for the 36th Turin Film Festival on Dec 1. 

Santiago, Italia is a documentary examining Italy's role in Chile following the military coup that on Sept. 11, 1973, ended Salvador Allende's democratically elected government.

Through raw footage and the words of firsthand witnesses from the months following the coup, the film highlights the role played by the Italian embassy in Santiago, which gave shelter to hundreds of adversaries of General Pinochet's regime, eventually helping them find a way to ...

Palme d'Or-winning director Nanni Moretti will unveil his latest film, Santiago, Italia as the closing night gala for the 36th Turin Film Festival on Dec 1. 

Santiago, Italia is a documentary examining Italy's role in Chile following the military coup that on Sept. 11, 1973, ended Salvador Allende's democratically elected government.

Through raw footage and the words of firsthand witnesses from the months following the coup, the film highlights the role played by the Italian embassy in Santiago, which gave shelter to hundreds of adversaries of General Pinochet's regime, eventually helping them find a way to ...

Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall was the Chilean drama Colonia starring Mikael Nyqvist, Emma Watson, and Daniel Brühl, which follows a young couple who become entangled in the Chilean military coup of 1973. Directed by Florian Gallenberger, it was picked up for a U.S. release by Screen Media Films and now we have the first U.S. trailer.

We said in our review, “Colonia ultimately falls prey to a desire for a concrete happy ending in the face of adversity. While the film’s exact conclusion works well in Argo because it’s the goal from the beginning, the airport chase here plays as an afterthought. We invest so much time in the compound and its oppression that turning the emotional drama of love into against-the-clock action feels disingenuous. Especially since not everyone survives the initial fight for freedom. How can we experience what should be...

It looks like Emma Watson has another solid looking film project for us to watch. It's called Colonia, and it's set in the '70s, and it tells the true story of a young woman who infiltrates a cult community to find her boyfriend. It looks like it’s going to be a pretty intense thriller.

The movie also stars Daniel Bruhl (Inglourious Basterds), Mikael Nyqvist (John Wick), Richenda Carey (Residue, Separate Lies), Vicky Krieps (A Most Wanted Man), August Zirner (The Counterfeiters), and Martin Wuttke (Inglourious Basterds). Here’s the synopsis:

Chile, 1973. Lufthansa flight attendant Lena (Watson) is in Santiago to visit her boyfriend, Daniel (Brühl), a talented graphic artist creating images in support of embattled President Salvador Allende. When Allende is violently ousted, General Augusto Pinochet’s forces begin rounding up dissidents. Daniel is taken to the remote stronghold of Colonia Dignidad (“Dignity Colony”), home to a secret...