Chilean filmmaker and film scholar Sergio Navarro Mayorga died last Saturday, May 22, at the age 78 of cancer. Between 1985 and 2005, he made over twenty documentary films documenting Chile during its transition to democracy, and he was also a key film scholar and film professor.
Born February 21, 1943 in Valparaíso, Navarro Mayorga graduated in electric engineering before enrolling to study film at the School of Communication Arts of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in the early seventies, where took classes with filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. With schoolmates Cristián Sánchez and Rodrigo González he worked on the collective fiction film Waiting for Godoy / Esperando a Godoy, which was never finished.
In 1975, he co-directed with Sánchez the fiction film Vías paralelas, a story about the helplessness seen through several uprooted characters, adrift, after the country’s cout d’état. In 1977 he fled the country and lived in Canada and Ecuador, where he made various documentaries in U-Matic format, including Encuentro por la unidad y defensa del pueblo Quichua.
Back in Chile, between 1985 and 2005 he shot over twenty documentaries mostly on video including Nostalgias del Far West (1988), Caminito al cielo (1989), Valparaíso eterno (1991), Rugendas, su paso por la Araucanía (1992), Cuartito rosa (1992), país de antaño (1993), Chile actual (1999), and Patricio Manns. Vuelvo al Sur (2005).
In 2002, he founded the Film School of the University of Valparaiso and became its first director, a position he held until 2013. In that same academic institution he did a Master's degree in Philosophy, and he received a Ph.D in Latin American Studies from the Universidad de Santiago. He combined his teaching with the publishing of books and essays on local and Latin American cinema including “El chacal de Nahueltoro, emergencia de un nuevo cine chileno” (2009, coordinator), “Acerca del cine como medio expresivo” (2011), “La poética de las imágenes del cine” (2014), “La naturaleza ama ocultarse. El cine chileno de Raúl Ruiz (1962-1975)” (2019), “La idea de pueblo en la encrucijada del cine Latinoamericano en los años 60-70” (2019), and the upcomingo “El lugar de la narración en el cine” (2021).
Some of Navarro Mayorga’s films are available to stream (with no subtitles) on the Cineteca de Chile’s website:
21 de junio de 1971 (1971)
Vías paralelas (1975)
El sueño del ratón en la sopa (1987)
De las armas y las letras (1987)
Nostalgias del Far West (1988, 2007)
Caminito al cielo (1989)
Cuartito rosa (1991)
