By Alonso Aguilar
Claudia Huaiquimilla bursted into the Latin American film scene with her endearing debut Bad Influence / Mala Junta, a touching portrait of friendship amidst adversity within the Mapuche community. In her second feature, My Brothers Dream Awake / Mis hermanos sueñan despiertos, the Chilean filmmaker goes back to the universal touchstones of the coming-of-age narrative to amplify the voices historically silenced by her country’s institutional violence.
My Brothers Dream Awake is a choral depiction of the hopes and dreams of a group of teenagers living their transitional years within one of Chile’s infamous penitentiary centers for minors. Their insecurities and improbable search for connection permeate the gray walls and grim aura of their everyday setting with a palpable warmth, a sense of humanity that guides Huaiquimilla’s expressive camera.
During the Costa Rica International Film Festival, Cinema Tropical’s writer Alonso Aguilar spoke with Claudia Huaiquimilla about the evolution of her style, portraying a nation’s dissent and dealing with historical neglect cinematically.
In a certain way, My Brothers Dream Awake and Bad Influence share elements regarding their perspective on youth and marginalization in Chile. How was the process of finishing Bad Influence’s festival route, and once again embarking on a similar perspective, even within a different context?
I thought that Bad Influence was going to be my only film, because for a long time it was stagnant. So I wasn't sure if I would continue with my career. The experience of attending festivals and premiering in Chile was essential. In one of these experiences, we were summoned to a juvenile detention center to present Bad Influence. Once there, I learned about the conditions in which these kids lived, and that many of these centers were prisons for adults and torture centers during the Pinochet dictatorship. When one enters it has an immediate impact, because it is difficult to see where the place of reintegration is, there’s only punishment and isolation.
That initial experience of presenting the film as so beautiful that we decided to do more showings in other centers and that's when I realized that I was facing my protagonists for the second film. The connection I felt with them was so strong that I felt the need to do something about it and to show a reality that was invisible to me and that I felt it was necessary for people to know.
My Brothers Dream Awake
In Bad Influence we can speak of a dramatic core centered on its two protagonists, while in My Brothers Dream Awake there’s a choral approach to characterization within the youth reintegration center. How was the process of building the dramatic structure from this perspective?
Within the cases that we collected in the centers there was also an investigation of events that have occurred. Many of them are not known because the investigations of what happened inside these centers has only recently begun to be published in Chile. One of the cases that struck me was the one that occurred in a city in southern Chile, where the boys rioted and it got out of control before ten children lost their lives. When I looked for those news, it hurt me a lot that there was indolence in the face of those deaths, because the news put it as if ten criminals had died. I went to see the tribute that there is to these kids and it is like a small altar where their photographs are faded.. When you look for news about this case, there is very little information, and the little information does not say a thing about who these children were. So that's what struck me. I thought that I would like to know what they dreamed of, what they wanted and what led them to make such a hasty decision: to riot as the only option for a better life.
In addition to its social context, this moment of youth is also, in a certain way, a process of uncertainty and transition in life. What interests you in particular about the responses of young people to contexts of adversity?
It seems to me that youth is like a vital energy that is necessary in the world. It's irreverent, it's disrespectful, it's uncontrollable like fire… it can even be scary for the same reason, but I think it's necessary. Little by little that flame is going out in people, and I feel that cinema has the power to recover some of that fervor, to encapsulate that voice when it is already going out, to make it strong again and reconnect.
I think that many times in the voices of young people there’s a truth that adults fail to see, especially in situations as complex as this one, in which they are making an extreme cry for help. I felt that in this case organizing a riot, had a political character. It has to do with a political claim that they end up putting their lives at risk to show that there is something that is out of order in this place.
Maybe if people saw these kids on the street protesting they wouldn't pay attention to them, but by being in front of a movie screen, in silence, I think that generates a different dialogue.
My Brothers Dream Awake
In both of your films there’s the central theme of adversity from a historically marginalized context, but in My Brothers Dream Awake you establish an important link with the history of Chile and a more frontal kind of violence. There seems to be a somewhat more explicit feeling of indignation and anger than in Bad Influence.
I think so. Bad Influence was my first time conceptualizing a film, and one has many themes expelled without so much reasoning. There was that criticism of authority, but from a much more personal level. In this case, starting from other people's stories and having to position myself in a different place made me see the situation in a more radical way. This institutional violence not only affects the boys who are locked up, but also those who are in charge, and those who interact with them.
I feel that with this greater distance, a more mature process could also have taken place with respect to the formulation of the core social questioning of the film. What kids feel within this institution has also been felt by thousands of people who have suffered institutional violence in Chile.
An unavoidable element in the political landscape is that the production took place during the social explosion in Chile. What was your relationship at the time of making this film with this historical moment of detonation?
One of the strongest demands on the streets had to do with the end of the type of institution seen in the film. So after some internal questioning, we felt that if there was a film that made sense to make at this time, it was this one, because it wasn't using or clinging to a movement, but rather working around the same pains in a different manner. The problem is that many renowned filmmakers do not belong to the affected segments of the population in Chile, and that is why these problems are not seen as much, but experiencing this is something that permeates the way to do things.
In our case, this feeling of dissent inevitably remained in the film, perhaps in a way that we are not yet aware of, but we felt that it was an urgent film and for that reason we did not continue to look for foreign budgets or anything, but to do it with what we had in a precarious way and with a very guerrilla cinema attitude, very similar to Bad Influence.
My Brothers Dream Awake
How do you relate these political inspirations with narrative structures such as the coming of age? Is it something that arises spontaneously or is it something you meditate on?
For me it is important to recognize that my cinema is political and to use genres in some way that allow me to connect with the audience in a simple way, that help me talk about something else. I admit that has been my strategy at the moment. There’s formal exploration, but it first starts from a narrative base that allows me to connect with who my audience is.
It's something I've been asking myself a lot lately: Who am I making movies for? There is a stereotype that independent cinema is made for certain people, and for this reason many others distance themselves, because they feel that they are in spaces in which they are going to feel uncomfortable, that they do not belong. So, finding ways to establish other connections has been super important to me, and I think that the coming of age portrays a pivotal moment in your life, which implies growing up and a kind of pain that is universal. I believe that every human being can connect with that feeling, and in an extreme circumstance, it allows you to see yourself in a world that perhaps you would never have imagined. It opens doors to places that otherwise I would not be able to enter.
My Brothers Dream Awake shows an aesthetic evolution with more expressionist passages than Bad Influence, both visually and sonically. How was the process of having these explorations in a film with such a strong political and emotional core?
My starting point is that I am not going to tell “the truth” about an institution, it is not a film that is sold as “reality”. I thought about what I and my vision could bring as I entered this place, and that was guided by the initial impact of a feeling of anguish.
I tried in some way to distance myself from the patterns of Latin American “pornomiseria” and the whole prison referent. To talk about a space that is unwelcoming, and in a certain way cold and unhomely, I looked for warmth as something given by the characters, by the dynamics they have and the resilience of their own bodies more than by the space itself. In a moment of high dramatic intensity for a character, I didn't necessarily want them to be in the foreground, but rather show how they are feeling about the space, which involved working a lot with shadows, and the symbology of that idyllic forest that surrounds them, which wasn't really there, it was a construction for the film. I feel that this film had to seek the light within the characters, that perspective of longing that society does not see in them.
My Brothers Dream Awake
Giving perspective also turns the story seen in the movie into more than just a footer in the news. How do you handle that emotional journey?
Sometimes as a society we become jaded. The levels of violence in our surroundings make us get used to it and we stop feeling angry. I think it's important to be angry and outraged. It's okay to demand more dignity, it's the least one can ask for as a citizen, not even privileges, something as simple as dignity, which is something we lost at some point in Chile.
One of the best comments I heard after the film was presented in Santiago was when people went to see the film and told me that they left wanting to burn everything to the ground. I like that mobilizing spirit, of showing that all is not lost, but that it is necessary to act in order to change things.
Is this common thread in your work about historical neglect and institutional violence in Chile something that you would like to continue exploring in the future?
In a way, yes, I'm just going to address a somewhat more personal project, which is a series for Netflix, which accounts for institutional, judicial, police and media violence against women in Chile. At the Latin American level, we cannot know how many femicides occur because they do not investigate with a gender perspective.
That story was very interesting because I no longer worked from the perspective of youth, but with a wide range of female characters from 8 year old to 84 year olds. But despite that I feel that the spirit was exactly the same, of focusing on pain and exalt the anger of things not being done in the way they should.
I also took inspiration from this for my third feature film, which is about a Mapuche girl living in the city. It will be a portrait of the 1990s, when Chile was going to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Spanish in America, which naturally was not something to celebrate for the Mapuche population. The indigenous groups were closely linked to the changes in Chile during the 1990s, and I feel that in a certain way it is also a reflection of what has just happened in terms of social dissent,
These are stories that do not appear in history books, nor in celebrated Chilean films, and that is why I think it is important to shine a light on them.
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Alonso Aguilar is a cultural journalist from San José, Costa Rica. He does editorial labor in Krinégrafo: Cine y Crítica and his writings have featured in Mubi Notebook, Bandcamp Daily, Film International, photogénie, Cinema Year Zero, Costa Rica Festival Internacional de Cine, La Nación and Revista Correspondencias.
