Chile has selected its contender to follow up on last year’s win of Best Foreign Language Film for Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman. Marking the nation’s 23rd submission for Oscars consideration is Silvio Caiozzi’s drama Y de pronto el amanecer / And Suddenly the Dawn. Caiozzi holds two previous submissions for La luna en el espejo (1990) and Coronación (2000).
Starring Julio Jung, Sergio Hernández, and Magdalena Müller, Y de pronto el amanecer follows Pancho Veloso, an aged writer of celebrity articles, as he returns to the home in the Chilean Patagonia that he fled more than forty years earlier to make something of his life. In that place in the mountains, where centuries-old trees rise above abandoned tombs and the sea drunk with rain conceals the roots of men, the writer tries to develop “sellable” stories from the end of the earth.
But doing so surrounded by his old friends, he faces his past and lets fall his façade. For the first time in his life, Veloso is able to produce a great novel in which all become characters - and himself a real artist. Y de pronto el amanecer won Best Film at the Montréal World Film Festival and could provide another nomination for the South American country.
