Revolutionary Bourgeoisie
About the film, “Chile’ 76”

Excerpts from a Filmmaker Interview

Q: Where does the idea of Carmen’s character come from?

A: As a teenager, I started wondering about my maternal grandmother whom I never met. There was a halo of mystery around her, but I could not really understand what it was. At home we had a series of objects made by her; some ceramics, paintings or drawings and a sculpture of a woman. These objects were like hints that made me so curious about her. Talking to my nanny, I discovered that my grandmother had committed suicide. My mother and some of our family relatives explained it as the outcome of a strong depression, but for me the sense of mystery that I had been feeling all along wasn’t about the suicide itself, but more about this housewife’s curiosity who would not ever settle by being simply and only a housewife. This drew the outline of a character I wanted to observe.

Q: Why did you decide to tell the story of this particular moment in Chile’s history from the point of view of a woman belonging to a conservative upper-middle-class family?

A: Wondering about my grandmother I thought: “Wait a minute, in what year did it happen?” And the answer was: “1976.” Ok! 1976! One of the most cruel and dark years of dictatorship! Before we even start talking about depression, let’s have a look at the big picture. How could we live thinking that what happens outside the walls of our home won’t infiltrate our domestic space? What is this mechanism of ours where we can keep on carrying out our daily life when people outside are being thrown into the ocean?

Q: The camera follows the female protagonist very closely throughout the film, almost isolating her from everything around her. Could you tell us a little more about this choice?

A: After various script versions I understood that the film was a character observation. I understood that I was looking through her eyes, and this became my guideline. This is why the title is so fundamental to me, because it sets up the contradiction: when you put a date as a headline you expect something big; a battle, the conquest of a new territory, the birth of a nation, not just the daily life of an anonymous woman. Our rule was to always be with her, sometimes to look at her, and sometimes to look at what she was looking. This was the way to keep us attached to subjectivity and not try to tell Chile’s history, the one I had read in my schoolbooks.

Q: Could you tell us more about the symbolism of giving shoes a special focus in the film?

A: I was not conscious about this at the beginning, it came as a coincidence. My mom had told me that she had once visited a relative that had just died, and was still in his mortuary room. She described to me how she was impressed when looking at his shoes at his bedside, all polished and ready to be worn. I was very moved by this image: for me, the empty shoes were the pure and simple image of absence. This made so much sense, not just as an anecdote, but as something that I applied to the whole film. How Carmen’s idea of the world was falling apart.

I was interested by the idea of fiction inside Carmen’s mind. How would she confront what she was going through. And I thought that it was interesting to have a hint of her imaginary world by looking at the movies she keeps watching. I like how this imaginary world infiltrates her mind to do what she does and how all this fiction fractures at the end. It also seemed interesting to me to see the contrast between what was being shown on TV while something horrific was happening outside.

About the Filmmaker

Manuela Martelli has participated in more than 15 films as an actress. In 2010, she received a Fulbright to pursue a Masters in Film at Temple University. :Apnea,” her first short film, premiered at FICValdivia, in 2014. She was also selected by Cannes Director’s Fortnight’s program, Chile Factory, to co-direct a short film with Amirah Tajdin, called Land Tides, which premiered at the Fortnight in 2015. She is currently premiering her debut feature film, “Chile ‘76.”