Co-presented with UnionDocs and Cinema Tropical
With director Ignacio Agüero in attendance
Almost an exact decade after we screened Ignacio Agüero’s Under Construction in collaboration with José Miguel Palacios, we are moved to invite him, Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto and Agüero back to open up a new conversation on the occasion of the 50 year anniversary of the 1973 Chilean Coup that overthrew Salvador Allende and established dictatorship in Chile.
In 1985, during the military dictatorship and after two years of massive protests against the regime, several Chilean directors were making documentary and fiction films. Celebrated documentarian Ignacio Agüero was one of them. He went out on the streets and to the locations and sets used by his fellow filmmakers, and asked them: Why are you making this film? Who is it for? With doses of humor and retaining hope in the face of palpable state violence, This is the Way I Like It is a kaleidoscopic view on the powers of making films in times of political urgency.
Three years later, Agüero turned his attention to a different aspect of film culture—education—and to a figure who had been crucial in his own college years—the legendary Alicia Vega. Vega was much more than a university professor. For decades, she led film workshops for kids in the outskirts and poor neighborhoods of Santiago and other parts of Chile. One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (1988) documents one of the early workshops led by Vega, in which she teaches kids about cinema by making thaumatropes, watching early silent films, and going for the first time to a movie theater. Agüero’s documentary captures an indefatigable educator at work and, in the process, offers a moving portrait of children’s imagination towards the end of the dictatorship.
Programmed by José Miguel Palacios & Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto as part of Chile 1973/2023 and its “Archives for the Future” film series. A special thank you to Icarus Films for their generous support of this program.
THIS IS WAY I LIKE IT / COMO ME DA LA GANA
(Ignacio Agüero, Chile, 1985, 28 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Director Ignacio Agüero interrupts interrupts the production of several films that are taking place in Chile during 1984 to ask the filmmakers what is the point of filming in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship.
ONE HUNDRED CHILDREN WAITING FOR A TRAIN / CIEN NIÑOS ESPERANDO UN TREN
(Ignacio Agüero, Chile, 1988, 57 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
A documentary about a film workshop for children given by Alicia Vega, a teacher in a marginal quarter of Santiago, to kids whose common characteristic is that they have never been to the movies. One hundred years after the invention of cinema one hundred children go to the movies for the first time . They tell their experience in a film they shall make with drawings on paper frames.
Thursday, September 21, 8pm
UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave. Ridgewood, New York City
For tickets and more information visit: www.uniondocs.org/event/archives-for-the-future-2023-09-21
