EL OTRO DÍA

An inner revolution: this is what the light accomplishes as it falls, from morning to night, on the different objects in the filmmaker’s house, a space as rich in memories and travels as it is enclosed and confined between cat and bird, books and family photos. Without the changes of light that the passing hours imprint on this tranquillity, the shots would resemble a still life. But as if to escape from a solipsism whose spatial extension is his domestic interior, Ignacio Agüero decides to film the people who ring at his door – beggars or the unemployed looking for odd jobs. Before long, he asks if he can follow them and film them in their own district. In front of the camera, the very notion of “home” is shaken to the core. Makeshift shacks, insalubrious rooms overlooking a polluting factory, gunshots between gangs outside, families broken by drugs, teen marriages or untimely widowhood, hunger… Rather than indulge in a sociologising train of thought on the rift between Chile’s social classes, the filmmaker steeps himself, and the intimacy of family or friends, in “lives other than his own”. (Charlotte Garson)