- From the 18th - 24th of September, the CNEX Chinese Doc Forum (CDF) will be held in Taiwan, a non-fiction film market in which Chile will seek to connect with the industry in the East.
- Diego Pino and Flor Rubina, director and associate directors of Chiledoc, will be travelling to Taiwan to represent Chile at the CNEX as well as Pepe Rovano, of Totoral Films.
Chiledoc is a tool with which to promote Chilean documentaries and nonfiction series abroad. They will be attending the CNEX Chinese Doc Forum (CDF) market in Taiwan, an instance in which Asian filmmakers and producers connect with the international industry.
“We had to find a specific, key location that was connected with the achievements that are being made in Chile and that could really connect us with the Asian world”,
says Diego Pino, director of the Chiledoc. For three years, the agency has been working towards making this connection with the Asian continent. Previously there were trips to Hong Kong and the CCDF to prospect, and now we have a delegation of three representing Chiledoc in the Asian film market.
“We think it’s essential to be entering a space where there is a natural connection with the type of content we do and the way we do things; this is why we chose this market, because it’s a specific forum for independent and creative documentaries and we believe that this first step will be essential in creating a strong relationship with filmmakers, producers and the Asian film industry, and specifically with China but also looking ahead to meeting industry agents from Japan, Korea, even Thailand and Mongolia,” adds Pino.
Tatiana Larredonda, Head of Creative Economy at ProChile, commented that, “in addition to serving as a way to strengthen the Chiledoc sector brand in the Asian market, our presence in the CNEX Chinese Doc Forum seeks to follow up and deepen the contacts made last year on our first visit to this important forum.”
"In that sense," Larredonda added, "our goal is to support and strengthen business relationships between our filmmakers and their peers, and take advantage of these types of instances to reinforce the position of our documentary filmmakers in the international market."
Generating this connection with Asia has been the result of an ongoing effort in projecting a vision towards the future and a market that today is thriving and more open than ever before. With a potential audience of 1.5 billion people, “Chiledoc has set the goal of connecting with this huge market through visits and bringing buyers to Chile: in 2017 Ruby Chen, executive director of CNEX, came to Conecta. This year we have the Japan NHK channel as a special guest, all this allows us to think that cementing a relationship, both artistic and commercial, with Asia is a real possibility!,” explains Pino.
New Chilean narratives
“My projects combine themes of memory and new technologies, such as immersive narratives in augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality,” says Pepe Rovano, Chilean director of Totoral Films, part of the delegation.
Rovano takes three projects to Taiwan: Memorial Rocas AR, an interactive documentary that reconstructs the history of a destroyed memorial site, which was created as a seaside retreat for laborers, but which after the 1973 coup d'etat was transformed into a torture camp. "The digital reconstruction is through an augmented reality app, which reconstructs the cabins in 3D and in real size, within which archival materials, testimonials, micro documentaries and photographs have been arranged," says Rovano.
The other projects are: Bastardo. La herencia de un genocida, Chilean-Italian co-production that tells the story of Pepe's biological father, a man convicted of crimes against humanity; and Relatos desobedientes VR, a fictionalized Documentary in virtual reality about stories of daughters, sons and relatives of genocide through memory, truth and justice.
