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El Viento sabe que vuelvo a casa

The Winds Know I´m Coming Back Home
José Luis Torres Leiva
2016 Chile 103 minutes Spanish
DR
DR
DR

Ignacio Aguëro (in competition at the 2013 Cinéma du réel with El otro día) sets out to meet the inhabitants of Chile’s Meulín Island to prepare a screenplay about the disappearance of a young couple – as an unverified local rumour claims. José Luis Torres Leiva takes this germ of fiction drawn from a real news item to rhyme his steps with theirs. He thus distends the ethnographic documentary by distilling a whole world of local life from ephemeral conversations. While the questions Aguëro puts to the young people auditioning for a role are direct and filmed frontally, Torres Leiva works obliquely, particularly when it comes to the relationship between the “indigenous” and “non-indigenous” islanders. The testimonies reveal a socio-ethnic divide within the territory: on one side is the centre, San Francisco, populated by natives, on the other, El Transito, whose residents descend from the colons. But just as a bridge links them together, the film’s two through-lines (casting and walking around) are permeable to one another, since the inhabitants encountered are as close to fiction as the would-be actors. This porosity even extends to objects: three basins for washing clothes then three dancing high-school students echo the three kettles on the fire… Like vanishing lovers, fiction has eloped with the documentary, evaporated into reality without even the tiniest theoretical crutch. (Charlotte Garson)

Production :
Globo Rojo Producciones
Editing :
José Luis Torres Leiva; Andrea Chignoli
Sound :
Claudio Vargas
Photography :
Cristian Soto
Copy Contact :
Globo Rojo Producciones

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