Film Screening: Machuca

Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with Great Cinema

Machuca was Chile's entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Academy Awards in 2004.

“Children experience events, but they do not judge. They simply live, and bear witness.”

“I was eight years old when the military overthrew Salvador Allende on September 11,1973. Of my forty classmates, at least fifteen lived in the shantytowns on the shore of the Mapocho River. These poor children were granted full scholarships by my school’s headmaster, a North American priest with progressive ideas about integration. This was a very enriching experience. It was stormy and cruel but also wonderful -- a flood of contradictions. That short period marked us all deeply, as it reunited to two worlds that previously were completely separated by the history of Chile.” “It seemed to me that to make this film was something absolutely necessary. Nobody has ever touched the loss of the democracy in Chile from this innocent perspective. Children experience events, but they do not judge. They simply live, and bear witness. Such a stance gives a great deal of freedom and truth to the story -- a perspective that is neither ‘political’ or ‘social’ but true to human life in all its greatness and misery.” “MACHUCA is also the very first film about that period done by a director who actually lived through the dictatorship in Chile. What’s more, I am the first Chilean filmmaker between ages 30 and 40 who would even go near the subject. This does not in itself confer greater value, but I believe that it opens the possibility of a further glance by others at those intense years.” “The worst sin would have been to try to say everything. For that reason, we strictly limited ourselves to that which the children wanted to show to us.”
-- Andrés Wood-Director of Machuca

Film Synopsis:

Santiago, Chile, 1973: Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna) is a poor boy of tribal descent, brought into an upper class private school during Chile’s brief socialist era. Gonzalo (Matias Quer), the well-to-do boy seated a row ahead, befriends Pedro against the bullying will of his classmates. In so doing, he discovers a raw, thrilling but wildly complicated world outside hisown previously sheltered home life. Pedro’s fierce, attractive young neighbor Silvana (Manuella Martelli) by turns mocks Gonzalo’s pampered background, only to fondly lead both boys in anumber of kissing games. All around them, Chile drifts toward civil war. Protest marches fill the Santiago streets with zealots of the right and left. At school, their humane headmaster Father McEnroe (Ernesto Malbran) comes under an hysteria-driven attack by parents for his charity toward poor students.

Amid so much public turmoil, little Gonzalo must also contend with more intimate kinds of upheaval. His sexy, melancholy mother (Aline Kuppenheim) is having a love affairwith a wealthy older man (Federico Luppi). His father (Francisco Kings) is sweet but ineffectual, and lacks the fire to fight for his marriage. Thus Gonzalo’s household seems headed for a regime change as unwelcome as the one brewing in the streets. He therefore escapes into his friendship with Pedro, and for a time the two boys become witnesses to each other’s lives. Pedro gets a look at the intense dysfunctions in Gonzalo’s life, and Gonzalo in turn is immersed in Pedro’s world of extreme poverty. The two boys share a love of comic books devoted to the Lone Ranger. With Sylvana’s encouragement they also take part in protest marches -- selling cigarettes and flags to demonstrators on the right as well as the left, but chanting with committed vigor when marching with the left. The already enormous rift between Gonzalo’s comfortable household and Pedro’s hardscrabble life a few miles away in an illegal shantytown ultimately becomes impossible to bridge, once the bloody military coup of September 11, 1973 erupts and capsizes the nation. All three children suddenly face moral tests far beyond their young capacities. As they do, Machuca inevitably surges to a heartbreaking, insightful finale.

Upcoming events