/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/FILM-CHILE: Boom in Documentaries Awaits Echo on TV

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Nov 27 2001 (IPS) - Documentary films have reached a high point in Chile, with broad support from the public and several international awards, but the future of this genre will remain uncertain as long as support from local television networks is not resolved.

Christian Leighton, president of the Chilean Association of Documentary Filmmakers (ADOC), says the mainstay for the production and distribution of documentaries is television – everywhere in the world except here.

This year, like never before, the Documentary Film Festival of Santiago was a major public event, drawing more than 4,000 moviegoers in a week of exhibitions at the Catholic University’s Extension Centre.

The interest of the cinephiles was no accident, as the festival was noteworthy for the artistic achievement and professionalism of the films, two of which had already received international prizes.

“El caso Pinochet” (The Pinochet Case), by Patricio Guzmán, won top prize in September at the International Documentary Festival in Marseilles, France, after having received loud applause at its showing – outside of competition – at the Cannes Film Festival.

The documentary, which follows the events that led to the October 1998 arrest of the former dictator in London and the subsequent legal proceedings in Chile, made its commercial premiere last month in France in 18 movie theatres.

Among the stars at the fifth festival of Chilean documentary films, held Nov 6-14, was the film “Nena problema” (Problem Girl), by ADOC’s Leighton and colleague Susana Foxley, which this year took the prize for best foreign documentary at the New York Festival.

Eleven of this year’s productions that were presented at the festival will be screened here until Dec 19 at a theatre of the Cine Hoyts chain, the leading movie theatre network in Santiago.

Inaugurating this extended exhibition was, unsurprisingly, “El caso Pinochet”.

After its turn at the Cine Hoyts theatres, “El caso Pinochet” will be distributed throughout the Chilean provinces.

Also this month, “La batalla de Chile” (The Battle of Chile), the mythical three-part saga that Guzmán shot between 1971 and 1979 about the leftist Popular Unity government and the 1973 Pinochet-led military coup, drew more than 2,000 movie-goers to an art filmhouse in the course of just one week.

“La batalla de Chile” was one of the films that was banned in this country during the Pinochet dictatorship, and was only “released” this year, thanks to a new law that eliminated the film censorship measures that had remained in force after the return to democracy.

Guzmán, a filmmaker who has lived in Spain since the coup, has thus been re-discovered by young Chileans.

A contemporary of Chile’s top directors of fictional films, including Raúl Ruiz and Miguel Littin, Guzmán plans to continue developing his record of contemporary Chilean history with a documentary on the overthrown president Salvador Allende. The film is slated to premiere in 2003, 30 years after Pinochet’s military coup.

Following in Guzmán’s footsteps, numerous Chilean documentarists, from 20-somethings to 50-somethings, are producing works on an array of themes, including politics, history, social struggle and daily life.

It has turned into a sort of renaissance of the documentary movement that had established itself under the Allende government (1971-1973) and which suffered an abrupt interruption with the tumultuous military takeover in which the Socialist president is believed to have committed suicide.

Guzmán and other documentarists of the era, such as Pedro Chaskel, Gastón Ancelovici and Orlando Lübbert, fled in exile to Europe, Cuba or Canada, but are now making a name for themselves in their native country.

Along with that generation, numerous new documentary makers are establishing their careers, including Leighton, Foxley, Paola Castillo, Pamela Pequeño, Lily Gálvez and two recent graduates of the University of Chile’s journalism school, Pedro Peirano and Alvaro Díaz.

All were among the protagonists of the latest Chilean documentary film festival.

The ADOC president said some of the productions had the backing of the National Fund for Art Development, a division of the Ministry of Education, which designates funds for artistic endeavours through annual contests.

In other cases, the relative decline in production costs resulting from technological advances – particularly digital cameras – has made independent projects possible that otherwise would have been unthinkable because of budget limitations.

The challenge now is how to maintain this “boom” in the genre, a point in which the documentary could undergo sustained growth or be relegated to a status of recognised merit but with little distribution among the general public, according to Leighton.

The key, he says, lies in what Chilean television decides to do as far as promoting and disseminating documentaries.

“Television’s involvement is minimal. In the best cases, the TV networks buy these films (Chilean documentaries) at what they consider a market price, which is minimal in relation to the real costs of the films,” Leighton told the weekly ‘Wikén’ newspaper.

He said the state-run National Television of Chile is one of the few stations interested in buying the documentaries, while support from the Catholic University’s Channel 13, the other leading free broadcast station, is practically non-existent.

National Television announced its plans to acquire some of the productions shown at this month’s festival, such as “Nena problema”, by Leighton and Foxley, and “La hija de O’Higgins” (O’Higgins’ Daughter), by Pequeño.

The network will pay 2,500 dollars for each documentary, which does not come close to covering their production costs, Leighton pointed out.

/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/FILM-CHILE: Boom in Documentaries Awaits Echo on TV

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Nov 27 2001 (IPS) - Documentary films have reached a high point in Chile, with broad support from the public and several international awards, but the future of this genre will remain uncertain as long as support from local television networks is not resolved.
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