• Feature films Alis and The Dive are part of the Guadalajara International Film Festival’s official competition. This will also be La picada’s world premiere.
• The Plan, a documentary project about a sabotage attempt on the 1988 Chilean democratic process, will be present at FICG Industry.
• Both festival and market will be taking place from June 10th to 28th, on-site.
Guadalajara International Film Festival’s 37th edition will begin on June 10th -an event of which two documentary coproductions will be part. Alis, directed by Nicolás van Hemelryck and Clare Weiskopf and produced by Lise Lense, Alexandra Galvis and Radu Stancu; and The Dive, directed by Felipe Zúñiga and produced by Alejandra Vargas Carballo, Federico Lang and Alejo Crisóstomo. Besides the Chilean documentary project, The Plan, directed by Pablo Stephens and produced by Cristián Hidalgo, will be part of the festival’s market, called FICG Industry.
Lorena Sánchez, ProChile’s international director, highlights the public-private effort to make Chile’s participation at the Guadalajara Festival possible and its involvement in different prioritized circuits of the audiovisual sector. “Chilean cultural and creative industries contribute to our exportable offer’s diversification and aggregation of value and quality. From that point of view, they are a priority for ProChile. Through our sectorial brands, CinemaChile and Chiledoc, we have joined promotion efforts, actively involving different sector professional associations, and the public institutions with which we keep a strategic alliance, to complement financial supports, allowing these kinds of participations to be financed”, she emphasizes.
The Dive
“Chilean and Mexican cinemas’ have a long tradition of collaboration and the space FICG Guadalajara has given to our cinematography, adding value and promoting its distribution. Today we land there with two documentary feature films and a project focusing on social struggles for territorial defense, political struggles seeking justice, and marginalized youths internally fighting to find hope. FICG Guadalajara is an important place for these struggles to be made visible”, comments Paula Ossandón, Chiledoc’s director, the organization responsible for promoting and distributing Chilean documentaries around the world.
Two documentary features will be presented at the festival as part of the official competition. Alis is a journey through the imagination of teenagers trying to break the circle of violence they lived in the streets of Bogotá, looking to embrace their future. This documentary will compete for the Iberoamerican Documentary Feature Film and the Maguey Award, an award for productions disseminating a cinema focused on open and diverse sexual orientation stories.
Alis
It is worth noting Alis has had an outstanding journey through some of the world’s most important markets and festivals, like Berlinale, IDFA, and recently Canada’s Hot Docs. “After years working on this movie, it’s incredible to have been selected in these two competitions; one of them within the documentary cinema world, and the other recognizing the contribution this movie makes in building a more diverse world, where we accept and embrace our own and others’ identities”, one of the directors, Nicolás van Hemelryck, tells.
The other movie competing for the Iberoamerican Documentary Feature film is The Dive, which will also have its world premiere at the festival. “The possibility of premiering at FICG gets our movie closer to buyers and distributors looking for regional cinema that know its potential market first hand. Besides this cinema celebration, you can live at Guadalajara during the festival is a wonderful event that always makes us feel at home”, comments Alejo Crisóstomo, one of its producers. The movie portrays Rosmeri, the last inhabitant of La Picada, a town in Costa Rica destroyed by the constant ash eruptions. The most active volcano in the country is her best friend, and that relationship is the driving force moving her to resist the pressure of those who ask her to abandon her home.
The Plan
Lastly, The Plan, will be part of FICG Industry, a section of the festival supporting movies at developing stages. This project portrays Miguel’s story, an undercover agent from Pinochet’s secret police recruiting children with parents who had been killed or made disappear by the government to create a radical and armed left-wing group and sabotage the democratic process the country underwent in 1988. “Today, human rights issues, the involvement of minors in armed groups, and authoritarian regime’s repression are echoing the past, and this movie goes deep into these subjects”, adds its producer, Cristián Hidalgo.
Chile’s participation at the Guadalajara International Film Festival is organized by Chiledoc, the Chilean documentary sectorial brand, and financed by ProChile.
internacional@chiledoc.cl
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