By María M. Mur |
Santiago de Chile (EFE).- The Chilean director and producer Andrés Wood says that “a little more time” is needed to cinematically tell the political labyrinth in which Chile is immersed, which this Sunday celebrates its second constituent elections in two years , and asks not to read the news in a “black or white” code.
“I think there is something deep that we still have a hard time understanding because it’s hard for us to understand the country we are,” Wood said in an interview with EFE days after his last two productions won the Platinum Awards, the movie “1976” and the miniseries “News of a kidnapping”.
“The process we are going through is very challenging,” adds the filmmaker, at the gates of Chileans electing the 50 councilors who will draft a second proposal for a magna carta to replace the current one, inherited from the dictatorship (1973-1990).
For Wood (Santiago de Chile, 1965), there are certain “inconsistencies” in Chilean society, which erupted “like a volcano” asking for more social rights in the 2019 protests and, two years later, rejected in a plebiscite last September a proposal for a new Constitution that shielded basic services such as health, education or pensions.
“There was a subtext, something underground that came out like an explosion. That volcano made everything obvious but, somehow, the subtext was left empty”, he explains.
“People are very dissatisfied. Our institutions fell, the Church, our power fell, ”he adds.
“We have to believe it more”
The first great success of Andrés Wood was “Historias de fútbol” (1997), although his best-known film is “Machuca” (2004). It tells of the friendship between two children from different social classes days before the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende.
With “La buena vida” (2008) he won the Goya for the best Spanish-speaking foreign film and with “Violeta se fue a los cielos” (2011) he paid homage to the great Chilean folkloric Violeta Parra.
His latest film as a director is “Araña” (2019), where he follows three far-right youngsters at the dawn of the coup, which will be 50 years old in September.
He says that he does not have a special predilection for this dark chapter of Chilean history, but recently his studio also produced the award-winning “1976”. It is set during the dictatorship and is the behind-the-scenes debut of Manuela Martelli, one of the protagonists of “Machuca.”
“It is a big crack in our society. It is our Vietnam, in quotes, and it conditions us to this day,” she asserts.
Andrés Wood is part of a select group
Wood is aware that he is part of a privileged club of Chilean filmmakers who have been able to carry out their projects in a country with little audiovisual financing and where cinema is reserved mainly for an elite.
“That is part of the self-criticism that the filmmakers and producers themselves have to make. Today there are political conditions and, above all, awareness and, somehow, that is being reversed, but not with the force that we would like, ”he admits.
After filming in Colombia the miniseries based on the homonymous novel by Gabriel García Márquez “News of a kidnapping”. The filmmaker believes that Chile should pay more attention to the cultural policies that have been developed there. And that they have helped to “consolidate” a “very important” industry, which a few years ago was only emerging.
“We should learn from the ability of the private world to unite with the public world in a much more spontaneous way. We are terrified of, in quotes, intervening in the markets. In Colombia they have been very creative through super specific incentives”, she explains.
Chile, he concludes, “you have to believe that you can have a great industry and, for that, you have to be creative and not dogmatic in economic thinking.”