By Natalia Hernández Moreno *
In When Clouds Hide the Shadow / Cuando las nubes esconden la sombra, the latest film by acclaimed director José Luis Torres Leiva, María travels to Puerto Williams, at the southern tip of Chile, to star in a film. But when a powerful storm prevents the crew from arriving, she finds herself stranded and alone. As she seeks relief for a sudden bout of severe back pain, María begins to discover the rhythms of life in the world’s southernmost city – and with it, an unresolved chapter from her own past.
Meditative and atmospheric, the film unfolds like a diary of solitude and revelation, capturing the fragile beauty of place, memory, and the passage of time. Starring María Alché—the Argentine director of A Family Submerged and star of Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl—in a quietly luminous performance, When Clouds Hide the Shadow delves into the mystifying geographies of the Chilean Antarctic Providence with the excuse of following the mise-en-scene of a film shoot, only to uncover tenderness and companionship in diminutive, easily dismissed gestures.
A few days before the film’s U.S. premiere, I chatted with Torres Leiva about filmmaking, finding a community in ambiguous geographies, and acknowledging the non-linearity of grief through the sharing of solitudes.
How did this narrative device originate to delay the start of the film within the film, to make room for other ways of seeing and being? It echoed your earlier film, The Wind Knows I´m Coming Back Home / El viento sabe que vuelvo a casa /
Yes, there is a strong connection with The Wind Knows I´m Coming Back Home. The fictional device, that way of working on the film, was an incentive to start this project and ultimately for the film (Cuando las nubes esconden la sombra) to be constructed in this new place with the people who live there, capturing what happened spontaneously between the actress and the people she shared it with. It also arose from my encounter with María Alché, which was very important to me, as I had always thought of her for the role from the beginning.
María Alché also has a connection with The Wind Knows I´m Coming Back Home, right? As she served as a jury member at one of the festivals where it screened?
Exactly! María and I later met again at other festivals, where I pitched the idea to her and proposed making the film in this particular place, a kind of end of the world/beginning of the world. And a little bit, there, this device of her as an actress, as a character who, within the story, is going to make a film (always showing this artifice of cinema) and inhabit the waiting for something that never comes, also emerged.
A bit like The Wind Knows I´m Coming Back Home, where Ignacio Agüero goes to the location with the purpose of casting and looking for a story, which gradually fades away throughout the film, and what ultimately remains are the encounters he has with people. That way of coinciding and showing artifice nourished the plot of this film. Here, we aimed to create an introspective journey for the character played by María, allowing us to include all the events that occurred during filming, both for María and the team. It was also a small team, similar to the one that worked on The Wind Knows I'm Coming Back Home, which always gave the feeling of something collective. And although there was a script, the film was rethought day by day according to what was happening. Some things were written, based on the research we had done, and others happened right there on the spot.
Similar to what can be perceived in your other features, your film, which blends genres quite organically, is a docu-fiction. It is as if María were a character with her name, yet not herself, and this discrepancy infects the film’s structure.
For me, the film María is going to make is precisely the film that is being made and that is finding itself in that plot. There were vital points in this transition that the film highlights, which relate to something somewhat intangible, specifically what happens to María in her grief, the ways she finds to cope with it, and the encounter she has with herself, the landscape, and the people she meets. And how the theme of death gradually appears throughout the film. I think that was, in essence, the process of the film. That’s why it was essential to capture the moments because, although the conversations were planned from the beginning, the people who worked on the film played themselves. And that allowed new nuances to emerge that María and all of us on the crew were discovering at the time. That’s undoubtedly where the magic of cinema comes in, which concerns the theme itself.
A particular scene that comes to mind is the scene where María goes to a store to buy a hot water bottle, which in the script appears more as an indication of the action without dialogue. We purchased several props for the shoot in that store, and since the lady who works there has such a strong personality, we decided to shoot the scene with her. And all the dialogue is improvised. We only did that one take. And just like that, without planning it, the theme of death came up through María’s mention of the flowers decorating the entrance (arranged for the wake of a Puerto Williams resident who had passed away). It’s astonishing how an unplanned scene serves as the beginning of the relationship that weaves María’s film and mourning together.
So it was nice to feel again what happened to us with the wind: to perceive that the film was alive.
I noticed the scene in the store because I think it’s wonderful that it creates new meaning through the film itself and is echoed later when someone tells María that there is no prescription for grief and again when a healer tells María that there is no linear process of overcoming grief. In the intimate bond that María builds with the community of Puerto Williams, it is telling that her grief, sometimes without being explicitly acknowledged, gives her a sense of companionship. I would like you to expand a little on how the story adapted to the filming of those small griefs that were already engraved in the community.
After conducting our research to find suitable individuals for the film, we held a pre-casting session with a local from Puerto Williams who was well-versed in the community and familiar with the profiles we were seeking. As an audition, they recorded videos that we watched before traveling, and I was struck by how many people discussed grief and death without thinking about it or knowing much about the story.
The one that surprised me the most was Paulina’s, who appears at the end in the car scene, because she tells the story of her mother’s death and the change she sought after her loss that led her to move from Santiago to Puerto Williams (as she tells María in the scene). And then when we went, before filming, to talk to all of them, the subject came up completely. That, without anticipating it, we were going to film in a community that was experiencing a lot of grief, in a place characterized by a feeling of isolation. Of finding ourselves in a geography at the end of the world, where what lies beyond is a mystery.
Paulina had lost her mother ten years ago, but talking about it was like reliving it. Over time, you can tell the story differently and see how your perspective on her absence changes. And that, which is so mysterious to me, had a lot of meaning in the details, in the how. That’s why that scene is presented through María’s gesture when, after accompanying Paulina to the hospital, she tells her that she will wait for her to take her home. And yes, she is a person she met at that moment and may never see again in her life, but they shared their loneliness for a moment through grief.
And for me, since this film was a process that originated with the grief of my mother and Rosario Bléfari (to whom the film is dedicated) and then my father’s, it made me more aware of the present, of the here and now. And I think the film raises that at the end, through an open ending, because that’s when María begins to realize how to live through grief. It’s a start. The sum of all these encounters, all these connections she has had so far, gives meaning to the end, a form of sustenance.
For me, making the film and now discussing it has also been a process of learning how to live through that grief. I was fortunate to be able to do something with it, but above all, to understand a little more through the reactions.
And to re-signify many, as well.
Precisely.
A moment ago, when you were discussing Puerto Williams, you mentioned the double meaning of the end of the world and the transition in which those geographies are redefined, from the map to more sensory planes. Just as María says to the scientist she meets in the middle of the forest: “You dedicate your life to the study of such small things in an immense space.” As an editor, after being present in that space as director, how was the process of reviewing those “tiny” things in the articulation of the film?
Many conversations with María and the other people are very long, lasting one or sometimes two hours, because they had a beginning and an ending that, of course, would not be recorded in the final version of the film (but which were important for those who had no acting experience, so that what we were filming made sense to them). So, when we reached the first cut in editing and reviewed those sequences of several hours, certain elements emerged that made a lot of sense about the film (like the scene with the scientist, which you mentioned). He talked to her for many minutes about bugs and his research, but what caught my attention the most was what was left.
And so it was with all the scenes. Reviewing the material was another way of thinking about the film: it made me realize what I didn’t know was there, what we were missing from María’s journey. And it goes hand in hand with what you say about looking back.
There was something extraordinary about María in all those scenes, which was that she had this ability to listen and live in the present, leading to such organic conversations. I think she’s not just playing the “María” from the script, but bringing everything that was happening to her into the mix. There was a combination of the character and reality, of how she discovered stories filtered through conversations.
The film was co-produced by South Korea, through funding from the Jeonju Film Festival, where it had its World Premiere (and where you had previously screened some of your films like Verano). How did this previously established collaboration influence the project dynamic influenced your most recent projects, such as this one?
Jeounju is a festival that has already showcased several of my films in various sections and has the unique feature of consistently curating independent cinema. They are very interested in following the careers of certain filmmakers. Additionally, they have a significant fund that has evolved, but which has now become a production fund that helps smaller, independent films get made. We were fortunate enough to secure the funding and to have the festival as a co-producer, with complete freedom to develop our story and shoot it in Chile.
Beyond this project, I have a lot of appreciation for the festival, and it’s no surprise to anyone that it has been very enriching for Latin American independent cinema in recent years. Matías Piñeiro, for example, has presented several of his films there and made a short film, Rosalinda, with funding from them. It is therefore valuable that, in addition to its exhibition platform, the festival is also involved in the spheres of financing and production. Above all, it provides you with a film-loving audience that consistently receives your projects with great enthusiasm. The times I’ve been able to go, the theaters are always packed, and I think the post-screening discussions are the longest I’ve ever attended.
There is always a lot of enthusiasm from an audience that is not exclusively cinephile, but a more general audience that connects with the stories and the love for that kind of genuine connection.
When Clouds Hide the Shadow will have its U.S. Premiere on Wednesday, July 30, 7 pm at Anthology Film Archives, as part of Lost & Found: Cine(ma)s Latinoamericanos Re-unidos, co-programmed by Matías Piñeiro and Carlos A. Gutiérrez. A special introduction by Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto, film and media historian and Associate Professor at Columbia University, will precede the screening.
This interview has been translated from Spanish and has been edited for length and clarity.
*Natalia Hernández Moreno is a researcher and Outreach Coordinator for Cinema Tropical – and frequent collaborator for TropicalFRONT.
