Chile's Valdivia Film Festival Unveils Lineup

BUENOS AIRES – The Valdivia International Film Festival (FICV) announced last Wednesday most of its programming for the 19th edition, which will open with Matias Cruz’s Miguel San Miguel, a black & white fiction set in 1981 about legendary Chilean rock band Los Prisioneros. 

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“The film focuses on the early days of the bans, from when they meet to their first live show as Los Prisioneros, and so it portrays the band’s influences, their formation, and Chile’s political situation as it was reflected by the repression unleashed upon their neighborhood during the Pinochet regime”, said FICV’s programmer Raul Camargo Borquez to THR.

The Closing Film will be the Russian collective film Winter, Go Away!, about recent political demonstrations in Putin’s Russia.

One of the most renowned fests in Chile, FICV has four separate competitions: International Films, Chilean Films, Latin American Shorts, and Chilean Film School Films. The program includes three focuses on filmmakers Silvio Caiozzi, Pablo Stoll, and Jean-Gabriel Périot. Other sections are Gala (for renowned filmmakers, with the latest from Leos Carax and Koji Wakamatsu, among others), Location (this year focused on Spain, and curated by Punto de Vista Fest programmer Gonzalo de Pedro), Music and Society, New Roads (experimental), Dissidences, and a new one called Latin American Vissions, which will review the region's cinema through a series of specific topics and screen films like the Cuban zombie pic Juan of the Dead and Edoardo Coutinho's Songs. 

“Valdivia has always been characterized by offering an International Competition that expresses contemporary cinema‘s new tendencies and reflections: a constant crossing of the fiction/documentary boundaries, the new concepts of realism and mise en scene, and hybrid approaches” explains Camargo. He adds: “The fest also offers a parallel program that includes the latest from great auteurs of world cinema, political and experimental films, and retrospectives on filmmakers”.

The International Competition of FICV will feature twelve films by independent directors:

L’Age Atomique (Helena Klotz)

De Jueves a Domingo (Dominga Sotomayor)

Fogo (Yulene Olaizola)

Sofia’s Last Ambulance (Ilian Metev)

Two Meters of this Land (Ahmad Natche)

El Jurado (Virginia del Pino)

El Bella Vista (Alicia Cano)

Leviathan (Lucien Castaign Taylor and Verena Paravel)

Polvo (Julio Hernandez)

A Última Vez que vi Macau (Joao Pedro Rodrigues and Joao Rui Guerra da Mata)

Carne de Perro (Fernando Guzzoni)

Viola (Matias Piñeiro)

The smaller Chilean competition will feature 7 films, including 5 world premieres:

Donde Vuelan los Condores (Carlos Klein)

Aquí Estoy, Aquí No (Elisa Eliash)

La Última Estación (Catalina Vergara y Cristián Soto) (WP)

Chaitén (Aníbal Jofré and Diego Ayala) (WP)

La Chupilca del Diablo (Ignacio Rodríguez) (WP)

A Primera Hora (Javier Correa) (WP)

Partir to Live (Domingo García-Huidobro) (WP).

The FICV is also charged with promoting the LatAm film industry through Australab, a wide-ranged industry networking platform for European and Latin American projects, which is focused on development, funding, and distribution, and runs simultaneously with the fest.

Australab (Oct. 3 - 7) holds workshops and meetings for distributors, sales agents, producers and festival programmers. One of its programs, Cinema Without Borders, triggered the creation of LARED, a regional network of independent LatAm distributors from Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Uruguay, that will meet again in this edition of Australab."This year we will try to make film distributon a priority of our work", said Australab delegate Erick Gonzalez to THR.

"We've decided to prioritize contents and distribution because we believe there are already enough platforms in the world dealing with co-production, and very few (almost none in Latin America) focusing on distribution"

LARED will announce in Valdivia the first film acquired by the network, which will be distributed in 5 countries. According to Gonzalez, the film will be screened in FICV and serve as the first step of a regular joint work of acquisition and distribution of films.