By Samuel Brodsky
With the recent U.S. theatrical release of Chile ‘76, directed by Manuela Martelli, and The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future / La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro by Francisca Alegría—two films directed by Chilean women, and both currently playing in New York City and in other parts of the country distributed by Kino Lorber Films—the international film community is starting to pay attention to the women filmmakers in Chile.
Martelli and Alegría now join the league of other Chilean women recently making rounds in the film festival circuit: others among them are Dominga Sotomayor, who became the first woman in the history of the Locarno Film Festival to win the Golden Leopard for Best Director for her film Too Late to Die Young / Tarde para morir joven (2019), and who also served as an associate producer on Chile ‘76; as well as Maite Alberdi, whose The Mole Agent / El agente topo (2020) was nominated for Best Documentary at the 92nd Academy Awards, and more recently won the award for Best International Documentary Feature at Sundance for her latest film The Eternal Memory / La memoria infinita.
The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future, Alegría’s debut feature, spins a multi-generational eco-feminist fable in the South of Chile, where a woman who has long been deceased, Magdalena, bubbles up to the surface with a school of dying fish. Her shocking and fantastic return opens up old wounds within her family, and causes tectonic shifts between Cecilia, Magdalena’s daughter, and Tomas, Cecilias’ transgender daughter. The film foregrounds folkloric themes and a sense of visual poetry to tell an intimate story of a family suffering from generational trauma with a timely environmentalist message. While there are political themes imbued within the film, Alegría’s debut never sinks into a two-dimensional social message in service of environmentalism or feminism, instead choosing to film the mysterious and elegiac beauty of the natural world.
Alegría grew up in a rural town of Chile called Los Andes, and fondly remembers the stories of folklore in the region that continue to influence her filmmaking today. “I had a digital camera, and I would just play around with it with my uncles and cousins in the Andes,” she said. The lakes, mountains, and perhaps most importantly, the cows, marked her deeply and inspired her to keep filming—but she never considered pursuing filmmaking as anything more than a hobby.
“Nobody in my family was an artist, and everyone thought I would study mechanical engineering. When I was around 16 I started watching films from Luis Buñuel, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I want to do this,’” she said.
At that time, around the year 2006, the only woman in Chile who had gotten any recognition as a filmmaker was Alicia Scherson, who had won the Best Director Award at the Tribeca Film Festival for her 2005 film, Play. She was one of the few role models that Alegría had at that time, and it inspired Alegría to continue filmmaking and drop out of her mechanical engineering program. “When I realized the few women filmmakers in Chile, I felt I had a sense of duty to set an example, and I threw myself fully into filmmaking. It couldn’t just be a hobby.”
At that same time, the filmmaker Dominga Sotomayor had just graduated from the new Audiovisual Direction program from the University of Chile. Like Alegría, Sotomayor did not have a clear roadmap for how to make it as a female filmmaker in Chile. However, she did have a wonderful team of collaborators.
“I actually feel very lucky, as a woman,” Sotomayor says. “I always had a team of like-minded collaborators both men and women—who supported me and my artistic vision… it was actually in other jobs and in other spaces that were not related to filmmaking where I felt unheard of for being a woman, or where I felt uncomfortable.” Sotomayor made a micro-budget feature in 2012 with the support of friends and family, From Thursday to Sunday / De jueves a domingo, a road movie that takes place over the course of one weekend, and that premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival. But it was a long and bumpier road before she got to make her next feature, Too Late to Die Young.
“I had to pass through various labs, workshops, and apply multiple times to the FONDART (the Chilean public funding agency for the development of art)”—she was rejected three times—‚ “and constantly be re-writing the script before anybody would invest in the film,” she said. Perhaps it was due to her inexperience, or perhaps it was because she was a woman, that the film struggled to take off.
“Although we are now seeing more women filmmakers like Maite [Alberdi] and Francisca [Alegría] there are still many problems with the industry in Chile,” she pointed out. “It’s hard to be taken seriously if you have not already been recognized by Europe.”
Alegría is now working as the director of an upcoming TV series adaptation of Isabel Allende’s novel House of the Spirits in Chile, with a network attached. Sotomayor continues to consult on her colleagues’ projects, while developing her own. Sotomayor is also on the board of directors of the recently-launched CCC (Centro de Cine y Creación), a cinema and cultural center for film in Santiago, Chile, where she will program a series of Latin American cinema co-presented by Cinema Tropical.
Chile ‘76 is currently screening in IFC and Film at Lincoln Center in New York City, and at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles. The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future is now playing at Quad Cinema in New York City, and opens May 26 at the Landmark Nuart in Los Angeles, with further engagements to follow. You can stream Dominga Sotomayor’s Too Late to Die Young as well as Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent on Amazon Prime and Apple Movies.
