By Natalia Hernández Moreno
Imagine a film that opens up with a swath of trees swaying in the distance with the passing wind, as smoke billows and hovers over them. Then, the smoke quickly turns a shade of orange. In one immediate moment, wildfires erupt around the trees, quickly and aggressively escalating the precarious condition in the Chilean wilderness.
Such is the craft of Pirópolis, Nicolás Molina’s fourth documentary. It follows the challenges and dangerous circumstances that the volunteer fire brigade in the port city of Valparaíso frequently find themselves in. They’re aided in these struggles by a French fire brigade that arrives in Valparaíso to train — and instill methodology to — their Chilean counterparts.
A warm and hospitable camaraderie is fostered between the Chilean and French firefighters as the country’s leaders and citizenry brace for the drafting of a new Constitution to repudiate the remnants of the pro-Pinochet dictatorship. Soon, civil unrest erupts on the streets, and, in parallel fashion, the wildfires quickly escalate around the city, disastrously impacting rural communities and neighborhoods. The brigades’ unified collective action must be implemented to effectively combat the ferocious flames.
After its world premiere in the Documentary Competition at Tribeca Festival 2024, I sat down with Nicolás to discuss his directorial approach towards the motif of fire, the intertwining of visual language(s) with sound, and his interest for tenderness in cinema.
This interview has been translated from Spanish and has been edited for length and clarity.
I would like to start by highlighting the visual richness throughout the film. Contrasts in color and focal lengths set a burning atmosphere and intertwine Chile's political history contextualized in a local context. What first drew you to closely explore this dual story through this fiery imagery?
Yes, well, I think the fire was the original stimulus to start developing the project. I never knew exactly where, but it was through this element that I got to know and investigate Chile's relationship with fires, and that's how I arrived in Valparaíso. From that point also began a journey of research that was, mostly, deciphering how to craft the point of view and to understand the connection this city has with the fires, which is mythical. Before being colonized, this city was already burning. The Mapuches who lived there called it “Alimapu”, which means burnt land.
But what I imagine is that when a property was burned, those who inhabited it simply moved from one place to another. There was nothing to preserve. Then, when the city began to be colonized, they began to protect its infrastructure in different ways. One of them was to create firemen from each colony that arrived at the port of Valparaíso, which was a very important port in 1800 for all of Latin America. So there was a very strong development of firefighting activity and technology. Each country had its own technique and I found that fascinating: to see what happened 150 years later and how all that ethic was transformed, which is now something completely different.
Afterward, it was easier to see how certain threads began to come together. The fact that the firefighters come together through volunteering, of having firefighters who also live the same life in places that have the same problems, and all of them have stories of fires: of their homes, of family homes that have burned down. I began to see there a very interesting symbology of how a city has a transcendental relationship with fires.
This logic of fire that has permeated and built the identity of Valparaíso is something that Batista (one of the French firefighters) mentions: "Valparaíso has always had a history, strongly linked to earthquakes, catastrophes, fires, and bombings. However, it has been rebuilt".
Of course. And very Chilean too, a country that is on a [geologic] fault. I think earthquakes have also cultivated the personality and culture of my country because one is always waiting for something to happen; one carries on with a very present feeling.
How did that feeling somehow translate into the final cut? How did that anticipation translate into the editing process, where longer versions of many hours of archival footage were condensed into the final montage?
I think there is an ethic concerning the dynamics and rhythm that I always dreamed of with the film, which had to do with lethargy, in terms of what was happening inside the fire company and how to generate that energetic break when the siren sounds and we have Dantesque fires in the film. That is, how to emulate with the film the same inertia that the company receives daily, which is from zero to one hundred, from one second to the next. I think the editing of the film, in essence, still has that rhythm, that dynamic, that explosive way of going from one place to another. But, in thematic terms, it was impossible to think of everything that was going to happen in Chile and the world from 2019 onwards.
Filming coincided with the social outbreak in Chile, by chance, and it turned out that the fire was the main symbol of social unrest that has been growing in recent years, also a product of a system of capitalization of nature that caused this area of intersection between the poorest people and the monoculture forests, which was a time bomb. Which I believe is a product of the same thing.
Well, the fact that this explosion occurred awakened a lot of general awareness among the whole country about what was happening in Chile. And that echo absolutely permeated the film. I mean, I think the film turned its perspective from what, initially, aimed for a purely ecological angle to the understanding of ecology as a system where we have to hold ourselves and our presence accountable.
In your previous documentaries, the audience can track an adventure narrative where the journey is decisive. In Flow and Los castores, for instance, the journey relates to the transformational flow of water, whereas in Gaucho americano the relationship the main cowboys have with their land evolves throughout variable cattle-raising processes as they change scenery. In Pirópolis, we stay in one place. What did it imply to lay the foundations in an area of perpetual "burnt land"?
Yes, that is a crucial difference. This film was a break in the pattern and has a much deeper connection, especially with the characters. And also in the personal relationship I had with the story. Unlike previous films that were more like adventures in themselves, always taking place in a place far away from where I was going to find something, this one took place in the place where I lived for many years.
And in the end, they [the cast] all ended up being my friends. During the pandemic, when there was nothing left to do, I would call him and hang out with them, and we became friends. So, in that sense, yes, the commitment was much greater with the film, with the mission, and also with the care of how the film takes care of something that for me is very important, which is that we worry about what is at stake and how the artificial nature that was generated around Valparaiso is generating catastrophes like the one that happened three months ago, where 140 people died.
So I think that, for me, there is a purpose outside of the adventure and what I experienced with the film, which goes from the human aspect to the artistic and more practical aspect of the collaborative axis, hand in hand with all those who did their part to finish the film. In every aspect, I am interested that people are concerned and that a warning of care and appreciation for nature reserves arises. This nature, at least that of Chile, which suffered -and continues to suffer- so much for the way it has been exploited, what this causes, and the damage it can generate to a society as precarious as many nuclei we have in Latin America.
I would like to dive into how sound plays a crucial role in the representation of fire and how its mixing goes beyond a Dantesque notion to situate ecological consequences through curated immersion. How was the process of recording that sound sensibility and then editing that cacophony of Valparaíso?
Yes, well, there are multiple layers sound-wise. I never know whether to unveil a little bit of the tricks of cinema [laughs] that hide many things. There is a reality, which is the one you live in, where there is an abominable sound and many things happen that are not in the film. The most serious problem we always had was that helicopters would fly over and throw water on us, on the recording equipment and they would come in and play with the sounds we were already recording. All those sounds live in my mind when I think about new fires because I was in many fires with the characteristics of the big fire that happened three months ago. Imagining what it must have been like is very distressing. That on the one hand, as well as the sounds that remain in my memories, which are different from those of the film.
I think that capturing the sound was very difficult and you need the patience to do it in parts because you are making a cadastre and a record and you try to have time so that the sound engineer can also pick that up, but what you do in the post is to make it fly and make it travel. In the film, in particular, we used 7.1*, trying to make it fly around the viewer. I don't want to reveal how we did the sparks or other more specific sounds, but there are many things that you would never imagine that are in the fire and that is why they made it into the final version of the film.
I would tell you, in terms of more artistic execution, the goal was to see the film and feel that fire vibrate the way you dreamed it would and to make it vibrate kind of always did everything possible to feel the way I imagined it could be.
And from there I was very lucky to work with Roberto Espinoza, who I consider one of the best sound designers in the world for his amazing projects in many contemporary Chilean and Latin American films. So all these elements added up truly made working with the songs the fires sang one of the most beautiful processes of almost the entire infrastructure of the film.
Hand in hand with this intradiegetic sound composition, I am interested in how, from the recorded dialogue, a linguistic and cultural barrier can be perceived with this French presence. How could this cultural specificity within Valparaíso be expanded to a more extensive radiography of Chile?
Well, that was precisely a parallel reflection that justified following history. We are what is left of a very arduous colonization process that took place hundreds of years ago and that in some parts is still going on. But it did lead to something else. And that present seemed interesting to me to discover and not to be obvious in the way it could be categorized. Especially in this very specific area within the company, where now with France, there is a collaboration that is very virtuous and with a lot of passion and a lot of effort on both sides to make the company function independently. It is not a government system that contributes to the company, but they are specifically making arrangements with Marseille, which sponsored this fire company.
And yes, I think that for me something important, at least in all my films, is what I would call humor behind the sadness, how this mixture of emotions generates a kind of nostalgia for something that was or how life was that at least I am interested in crystallizing. I think that part of the film is to present a world, to generate, to generate emotions, and sensations, but there is also another part of generating a record of a specific moment of this place, of this company that will not be repeated and that will be immortalized in a film.
This same gesture has operated in all my previous shoots and will continue to do so. There is something in the will, like why I do what I do, that has to do with crystallizing forgotten characters, even trades that will probably disappear in the next few years the way they are done now. And, when they remain in a film, they generate a spark. I try to generate that very personal sensation that I feel when I see feature films from 40, or 50 years ago and one has that emotion of how the world was.
Sometimes I think about how this film will be received in fifty years and how they will see, within the company, the problems of inclusion, along with their very high levels of precariousness. I don't know what the fires are going to be like in fifty years, but I imagine it's not going to be a problem that's going to diminish. And, again, in that presentiment, there is some of that.
Well, to revisit the past in cinema is to participate in a sort of revival through images, isn't it? What Chilean and Latin American films would you say have contributed to curating your gaze?
I have a fascination for a Chilean director named Ignacio Agüero, who marked for me an insignia element of how I understand humor in cinema, which is like an ethnographic becoming of a behavior that, if one observes it and stops, generates a lot of grace, a lot of emotion, a lot of tenderness.
I also believe that, if there is one emotion I like in cinema, it is tenderness. And this is already properly artistic, but mixing tenderness with other dynamic emotions that contrast and generate changes of rhythm was the scope I wanted to give to the plot of the fires; tracing like a cinematic of fire.
I think that alchemy makes me float in a kind of cloud where I feel comfortable, but I think that without tenderness it would be impossible for me. And that's why I'm always alert to that feeling and to what moves me. And, regardless of the different types of characters, which do not necessarily always exude tenderness, I always try to look from that place. Other contemporary directors whose perception of the rhythm of life I feel identified are Viktor Kossakovsky and Gianfranco Rosi.
And lastly, I’d like to ask you about Pirópolis’ reception during its premiere in Tribeca. Were there any particular reactions from its first audience particularly insightful?
It has truly been great. I think the film is difficult to test until it truly comes out and is played in front of a physical audience. For instance, there are many decisions where you want to provoke certain emotions or there is one that is more variable than others; especially humor and especially in a film that is dramatic at the same time. But everything that happened after the show, and all the people’s reception walking out of the theater and those I met on the street was thrilling.
I think there was a lot of the film in terms of meaning and symbolic layers that are a little hidden inside the film and were, eventually, captured. And that makes me very happy because that's like the finest work you can do to make a film: not to be obvious, not to deliver everything on a platter. And the thing is that all these ways, at least as I read the real problems of the film, can also be expressed through cinematographic language that is neither oral nor written. It’s something else. It's easy to write a report about this problem. But I think that cinematic value is what interests me the most in the film. How do you feel what it's like to be in that place? And I think this is the beginning of multiple audiences accepting the pact and entering the lethargy.
