Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires Festivales de Buenos Aires Agenda Cultural de Buenos Aires

El otro día

april 14
19:55h
sold out

Village Recoleta Mall

Room: 6

 

Film information

Director ← [ + info ]

Ignacio Agüero

Thirty-four years ago, one of the essential filmmakers in Latin American cinema was getting his degree in Art Direction specialized in Cinema. A young man who studied in the now mythical School of Communication Arts in the Catholic University, an institution destined to disappear after the graduation of the last class that had entered during the military dictatorship.

This way, between the certainty of disappearance and the will to do something to fight oblivion, he made his first films in a Chile where the horror of human rights violations coexisted with the incipient consumer society promoted by an advertising industry that became a true learning institution for Chilean filmmakers.

But his weekly job in advertising allowed him to clandestinely give way to his interest in witnessing the Chile of the time, the one that didn’t made it to the news. Behind his boss’ back, he used to take out the film equipment on weekends to start filming the Lonquén ovens, where the remains of several disappeared-detainees were found. The result of this footage would become the documentary Not to Forget, which he signed under the pseudonym of Pedro Meneses in order to avoid any possible retaliation from the regime.

Clandestinely made, edited and exhibited, Not to Forget would become an approach to the human rights universe so strong that risked not only persecution from the repressive machine, but also the label of that denounce theme. As an answer to this issue, in 1986 he released The Way I Feel Like It, a sum-up of Chilean cinema shoots in 1985, in which the filmmaker visits film sets and questions their directors. In this same piece we see the face of the filmmaker, who from now on will sign his films with his real name: Ignacio Agüero.

His work will continue with the filming of every class of a children’s film workshop imparted by Alicia Vega, her professor at the Catholic University, in the town of Lo Hermida. The result of this process is One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train. Alicia Vega’s passion for teaching unfolds in front of our eyes, following by the letter the impoverished kids’ film-learning process, in a moving story that would bring international recognition to Agüero.

The return of democracy would imply a much more radical search in the way he addressed the documentary genre. This way, a possible institutional film for the Chilean Navy became an imaginative and experimental story about the odyssey of an iceberg’s journey (Dreams of Ice). The pulse of a city that disappears without people noticing it will be seen from both anonymous construction workers and through the individualized figure of a college professor who sees how his own history disappears (Under Construction). And the history of a town where trains no longer stop will give way to how the same town builds the tale of its own history (My Grandmother’s Mother Told My Grandmother). Thus, the way to tell a story gets established on the basis of stories that appear to be minimum, and yet imply submerged, invisible processes.

The return of democracy, however, doesn’t mean he forgets the resistance he carried out under the pseudonym Pedro Meneses: Agüero will expose the complicity between Chile’s most powerful media group, El Mercurio, and the dictatorship. In Agustín’s Newspaper he exhibits his own commitment to both cinema and the future of Chile, risking the same censorship he experienced during the dictatorship, and his own peace of mind, in order to reveal and document what happened.

The deep connection between minimum stories, intimate ones, and the history of the country, will see the light again in his last work. The Other Day explores the possibilities of storytelling, based on the simple action of waiting in one’s own home, while evoking and establishing a thread that connects people who don’t know each other in a great human map, a huge work of geometry and mystery (the film’s original title) that delivers a motto we should never forget: cinema is our home.

RC

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