Talk: Chile in the Heart

IFFR is proud to welcome directors Angelina Vázquez and Miguel Littin who'll be joined by José Miguel Palacios, CSU Long Beach Department of Film & Electronic Arts Assistant Professor, on stage for a panel on Chilean cinema in exile.

While both are towering figures of this context, their trajectories were quite different. When Vázquez left Chile, she had already made some short films and worked as a camerawoman on Patricio Guzmán's La respuesta de octubre (1972), alongside having been an activist for the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR, the Revolutionary Left Movement). The majority of her films were then made in Finland where she found refuge after Pinochet’s coup d’état in 1973. Combining direct cinema and essayistic approaches in works like Two Years in Finland (1975) or Fragmentos de un diario inacabado (1983), Vázquez shaped a distinctly personal vision of Chilean life in exile.

Miguel Littin, prior to the coup, was one of the most celebrated Chilean directors thanks in no small part to the film El chacal de Nahueltoro (1969). He went to Mexico, arguably the only Spanish-speaking film culture on the continent whose industry could accommodate an auteur of his ambition, resulting in Actas de Marusia (1975), one of the most lauded Chilean exile fiction features.
Starting from these distinctly different experiences, the three will discuss what these events meant then, and what they can mean to us now.