A Look Into Chile's Cinema Grappling With the Dictatorship's Dark Legacy

In our first few editions, we toured Los Angeles, Puerto Rico, and the World (Cup). For our fourth newsletter, movie critic Alejandro Riero takes us to South America and delves into Chilean cinema. In particular, he looks at productions that grapple with the troubling legacy of dictatorship. Even with Augusto Pinochet's reign long in the rearview mirror, the filmography dealing with this repressive time in Chile's history continues to grow.

Happy Watching,

— Vanessa

Milagros Mumenthaler’s superb third feature, “The Currents,” opens with an impulsive act: after accepting an award in Geneva and then dumping it in the trash, fashion designer Lina jumps from a bridge into an icy river. Back in Buenos Aires, Lina goes on with her life as if nothing had happened. But her sudden fear of water estranges her from her husband, her daughter, her career, and even her mentally infirm mother.

Playing in theaters nationwide and available on Video on Demand on July 14.

Carmen (a riveting Aline Küppenheim), a well-to-do middle-class wife of a respected hospital administrator, travels to their beach house to oversee its renovations in actress-turned-director Manuela Martelli’s feature debut. There, she is asked by the local priest to take care of a young man who’s been wounded by a bullet. Reluctant at first, Carmen agrees, out of curiosity, to lend a helping hand; she soon begins to lead a double life as both a collaborator to the opposition and a respectable member of the Chilean bourgeoisie.

Streaming on Kino Film Collection and other platforms.

— By Alejandro Riera

Chilean cinema is still reckoning with the dark, traumatizing legacy of the Pinochet regime. There is a good reason for this, though: after all, one of the dictatorship’s immediate actions was the complete demolition of Chile’s young and thriving film institutions, the exile of many of its filmmakers, and the disappearance of others. Movies can give voice to the voiceless and unveil the many hard truths (and secrets) like no other art form can.

Two productions dealing with this period are currently touring the festival circuit. Juan Pablo Sallato’s critically acclaimed and award-winning feature debut “The Red Hangar” (“Hangar Rojo”), about the very first day of the coup, has already screened at the Malaga, Berlin, Guadalajara, Miami, and Seattle film festivals and has been picked up for U.S. distribution by Pragda. And Manuela Martelli’s sophomore feature “The Meltdown” (“El deshielo”), which takes place in the years right after the end of the dictatorship, just premiered at Cannes.

Then there’s the curious case of Diego Figueroa’s unsettling feature debut “A Yard of Jackals” (“Patio de chacales”). After playing the festival circuit for almost two years since its 2024 world premiere at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, the movie is now being released on Blu-Ray by IndiePix. Whereas in the past, studios and distributors released films directly to video to recoup their investment, today it's just another channel to reach a larger audience in this fragmented, oversaturated, algorithm-driven marketplace, as long as there is strong word-of-mouth and critical attention surrounding it. In other words, don’t sleep on this one.

Set in 1975, a couple of years after Salvador Allende’s government was overthrown, “A Yard of Jackals” follows Raúl (Néstor Cantillana, Amazon Prime’s “The House of the Spirits”), an architect hired by the military to build models of future constructions, who takes care of his bedridden mother. In his spare time, Raúl also builds faceless miniature figures, some downright bizarre (one of them of an old woman with antennas coming out of her caved-in head). He meticulously folds his clothes and, without fail, picks up new shirts from a salon co-owned by Laura (Blanca Lewin), who records the sounds of nature Raúl uses to calm his mother down, and her sister Renata (María Jesús Marcone). He also limps as a result of a bullet wound he received while at military school. Basically, your prototypical loner.

As the picture opens, Raúl wakes up from a dream within a dream featuring a young man with deep, long scars on his face that make him look like a broken figurine. Days later, he and his mother are violently woken up by loud voices, screams, and music from next door. Raúl calls the police, but they are turned away by a well-dressed man who flashes a badge at them. The sounds grow louder and more violent with each passing night.

Raúl notices strange men standing around his street, sometimes staring straight at him. Then, there’s the constant sound of a ping-pong ball being bounced from the yard next door, one of which ends up in his own yard. Climbing over the wall to take a peek, Raúl discovers the same scarred-face man of his dreams playing with a German Shepherd, who soon becomes a participant in the brutal acts happening next door.