During this week's edition of Thursdays of Chilean Cinema we are streaming two powerful documentaries that look at the political from different viewpoints. One of them narrates how social resistance is lived in protests and on the street, and the other looks at how the reversion of the domestic can be a form of empowerment. We invite you to take a look at the various forms in which political documentaries can be manifested, by watching The City of Photographers (2006), Sebastián Moreno's debut and The women and the Passenger (2012), by the directors Patricia Correa and Valentina Mac-Pherson.
The city of photographers shows how a group of Chilean photographers during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet recorded the resistance movement, preserving audiovisual footage that supported the testimonies of victims and their families.
This documentary brings to the table hot-topic issues that include the need for freedom of expression in repressive societies, and the ways in which censorship operates. Through the account of journalists and artists, we bear witness to those who bravely demonstrated how a camera could become a tool in the struggle for social justice.
The City of Photographers is a classic Chilean political documentary that recalls one of the darkest times of 20th century Chile and the role that art played in the defense of Human Rights. The relevance of this film today is evident, precisely in that it invites us to identify ways in which image and photography can be a tool for social change.
Among its many distinctions, the film obtained the Jury Mention at the DocsDF Festival; FEISAL Jury Special Mention at the Guadalajara Film Festival and Best Documentary at the Milan African, Asian and Latin American Film Festival.
Sebastián Moreno has also directed the documentaries Habeas Corpus (2015) and Guerrero (2017), which have obtained different recognitions in Chile and internationally, and which also compose portraits of resistance in our society. Currently, Moreno is finishing a project titled Sergio Larraín, the eternal moment -part of our 2020 Cinemachile Catalogue- which includes a documentary feature film, a television series, and different audiovisual capsules produced by Películas del Pez.
Click here to watch The City of Photographers
The women and the Passenger is a 45-minute mid-length documentary that explores the connection between sex and love through four women who work cleaning an emblematic motel in downtown Santiago. Through their experience, the taboos of our society are revealed, composing a portrait of how society works in disconnecting women from their own bodies.
The film is constructed through the juxtaposition of elements that seem to be contradictory: romantic passion versus waged labor, the erotic versus the obscene, public spaces versus the private sphere. These limits are tested by seeing how these four women clean up after the sexual encounters of others, reaching a moment in which they re-appropriate their own sexual past.
The women and the Passenger is a key film to revisit the stereotypical role that women are still forced into in our society, and how sexual liberation and breaking from domesticity can be seen as a political act. It won the Pedro Sienna Award for Best Documentary and won FIDOCS, both in 2012. It also participated in the world's most important documentary competitions, including the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA).
MacPherson is a screenwriter, art director, and film director. She has produced, written and directed award-winning documentary films at international festivals in Russia, Poland, and Chile, among others. She directed the short film French Fighter Pilot in 2018, which premiered at the Valdivia Film Festival. Currently she is working on the script of the fiction feature film Allá Arriba and is developing the documentary series Los Muertos.
Correa has worked in television and film, in shorts, medium-length and feature films. Her work includes Arte en las películas shown on the Chilean channel 13C. She is currently working on her feature documentary Third Act.
Additionally, MacPherson and Correa are developing the project Hay cupo, which participated in various labs including the TIFF workshop.
