News | FACING THE SEA

Mauricio, a young twenty-something with dreadlocks, watches over the safety of vacationers on El Tabo beach, near Valparaíso, on Chile’s central coast. His golden rule for the job is never getting wet, that is, working on prevention. The antagonist is Jean Pierre, a colleague from the next lifeguard tower who, apart from being too lenient in his duties, has a totally different view on the job: he is all about getting in the water. This is the framework for the documentary El Salvavidas, one of the 11 Chilean films shown at this edition of BAFICI: an "ethnographic tragicomedy,” as defined by its author Maite Alberdi. The film will be screened today, Tuesday, and tomorrow, Wednesday: tickets are available for purchase at the Festival’s ticket outlets and on this website.

El salvavidas won the Audience Award at the Valdivia Film Festival, in its country, and successfully participated in the IDFA, the world’s biggest film event devoted to non-fiction, held in Amsterdam. Maite Alberdi is one of the young promises of 21st-century Chilean cinema. She holds diplomas in Aesthetics, Social Communication and Audiovisual Direction from the Universidad Católica de Chile. She has directed the documentaries Los Trapecistas and Las Peluqueras, and has been working, for the past two years, on her favorite little creature: La once, a film in which she follows a group of female friends, including her own grandmother, who have been ritually getting together for tea, for over half a century.