Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM-CHILE: A Child’s Eye View of the 1973 Military Coup

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Sep 21 2004 (IPS) - With the premiere last month of director Andrés Wood’s Machuca, it appeared that the Chilean film industry had finally reached adulthood – an unusual accomplishment for a movie that tells its story through the eyes of three children.

The film is set in the years of socialist President Salvador Allende’s leftist Popular Unity government (1970-1973). The backdrop for the movie – based on real events – is an experiment carried out in a private school in Santiago, where children from neighbouring shantytowns were integrated into the classrooms.

In the first three weeks following its Chilean premiere on August 5, the movie brought in 307,000 viewers, outdoing even big-budget Hollywood fare like I, Robot.

Machuca is well on its way to breaking the records set by the two biggest Chilean box office hits to date: 1999’s El chacotero sentimental (The Sentimental Teaser), by director Cristián Galaz, and 2003’s Sexo con amor (Sex with Love), by Boris Quercia. Both were seen by close to a million viewers during their initial theatrical runs.

The movie centres on the friendship formed between Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna), a poor boy brought from the shantytown to study at St. Patrick’s School, and Gonzalo Infante (Matías Quer), the son of a well-to-do family who attends the school.

The trio of youngsters who provide this child’s-eye – but by no means innocent – view is completed by Silvana (Manuela Martelli), one of Machuca’s neighbours in the shantytown. Martelli made her movie debut earlier this year as one of the main characters in B-Happy, by director Gonzalo Justiniano.

The adults in the cast include veteran Argentine actor Federico Luppi, Chilean actresses Aline Kuppenheim and Tamara Acosta, and actors Ernesto Malbrán and Francisco Reyes.

Malbrán has the pivotal role of Father McEnroe, the Catholic priest and headmaster of St. Patrick’s who spearheads the initiative of integrating underprivileged children into this traditionally elitist private school.

It is a case of art imitating life – and in this case, the director’s own experiences: as a boy, Wood attended St. George’s College in Santiago, where Father Gerardo Whelan tried out a similar experiment. It was cut short by the military coup of September 11, 1973.

The movie is dedicated to Whelan, who passed away in October 2003. Although he was expelled from the school by the military dictatorship, his experimental educational project – complete with farm labour and other forms of community work – has been revived at St. George’s.

"One of the merits of Machuca is that, unlike The Sentimental Teaser and Sex With Love, it doesn’t aim for box office popularity through comedy," film student Sonia Lira told IPS. "Instead, it courageously and honestly tackles historical drama, when many would have believed that people had been saturated with stories about the 1973 coup."

One year ago, on the 30th anniversary of the September 11, 1973 military coup that overthrew Allende, television networks and newspapers presented the Chilean public with a profusion of personal testimonials and reports on human rights abuses committed during the military dictatorship that followed the coup.

It was the first time that the majority of Chileans had been exposed to these tragic accounts of the years when the country was ruled by dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

For Chilean novelist Alberto Fuguet, Machuca is remarkable for having overcome the almost visceral rejection that most Chileans feel towards anything related to Pinochet. For him, the movie has succeeded in combining artistic merit and box office appeal.

"Wood had the wisdom to tell his story ‘tangentially’, although that doesn’t make it any less direct," said Fuguet, the author of Mala onda (Bad Vibes), Sobredosis (Overdose) and Tinta roja (Red Ink).

"Machuca demonstrates that there is a real hunger for exploring our history," he added. "And like all history, it is unavoidably political. If you were thinking of leaving out a political backdrop for fear of alienating or frightening your potential audience, then fear no more."

Machuca is Wood’s fourth firm. He made a promising start as a director in 1997 with Historias de fútbol (Football Stories), which was followed by the somewhat less successful El desquite (Revenge) in 1999 and La fiebre del loco (Loco Fever) in 2001.

Wood was able to complete Machuca thanks to financing from production companies in Spain, the United Kingdom and France. The Chilean government contributed only 125,000 dollars to the film’s 1.2 million dollar budget, through the National Fund for the Development of the Arts.

This tale of friendship shared by children despite the social discriminations all around them – a situation that Allende tried to remedy – in a polarised country caught up in a growing spiral of political violence, could not possibly fail to have an emotional impact on audiences.

The response overall has been one of respect, "sometimes applause, sometimes a meditative hush, but always respect, towards a movie that only a few years ago would have elicited outbursts, fistfights, broken windows, fighting among family members, hissing and booing – or deafening applause," said Ignacio Walker, a Christian Democrat politician.

"The reactions to Machuca reflect a certain degree of maturity on the part of Chilean society, a willingness to reread its history. And this doesn’t only include those of us who lived through the Popular Unity era, but also the young people of today, who are deeply moved by the movie," Javier Zelada, a 57-year-old viewer, commented to IPS.

One of the few discordant notes came from the manager of the only Showtime theatre chain venue in the city of Osorno (900 kilometres south of Santiago), Ximena Pool, who refused to show the film, claiming it was "too political".

Sandro Angelini, the general manager of Showtime, subsequently fired Pool and apologised to the public in a radio interview, referring to her decision to ban the movie as "cosmically" stupid.

Machuca had its world premiere in Spain a month before it opened in Chile. It was chosen from among 22 movies from 10 countries as the audience favourite at the Latin American Film Festival held in Lima, Peru in August.

Wood also accompanied the movie to the Edinburgh Film Festival in Scotland late last month. In the meantime, back in Santiago, one of his co-scriptwriters, journalist and writer Roberto Brodsky, declared that he wouldn’t be surprised if Machuca was nominated for an Oscar.