Dominga Sotomayor's short films

The first thing that stands out in this cycle is the enormous pulse of cinema in Dominga Sotomayor. Besides having started filming at a very early age — writing her own scripts and alternating between short and full-length films, working alone or in collaboration —, the filmmaker is one of the founders of the production company Cinestatión and the CCC — Centro de Cine y Creación, in Santiago, Chile. Viewing cinema in this way, as a complete craft, is the only way to resist financial interests that sometimes impoverish the subject matter of films and sometimes promote their invisibility. In this sense, Dominga Sotomayor's career is an admirable exercise in political awareness and also a sign of the youthful wind sweeping through Latin America.

Conceived over the course of twelve years, the short films in this session portray everyday scenes of family life. Debajo, La isla and Sin título show how tensions and silences, common in these encounters with many children and adolescents, intensify before extraordinary situations. The three works fall within what is conventionally called fiction, but the camera works in an almost documentary-like manner: observes daily routines from a distance and without haste. In general, the story has already been going on for a while, and we only begin to understand the plot gradually, once we are already attached to the characters and the landscape. With no real beginning or end, and free of artifice, these films become mysterious: every passing minute brings small discoveries. Finally, Correspondencia is a kind of essay about the filmmakers' own families and seems to close a perfect circle.

In Debajo (2008), one of Sotomayor's first works of fiction, a man who lives in a house without electricity in the mountains, far from everything, invites some relatives and his daughter, with whom he maintains a distant relationship since his separation, to watch an eclipse. The film is shot entirely outdoors, with an aerial perspective. The technical device, as well as the setting (at times, the backyard resembles a glass bell jar) and the astronomical phenomenon itself, create a somewhat claustrophobic atmosphere. At one point, the girl asks her father what would happen if it stayed dark forever, and he replies that he does not know. When darkness falls, all the characters dissolve: we only see the reflection of the protective goggles. In that obscurity, and in that not knowing, Jaime manages to gain his daughter's trust.

La isla (2013), co-directed with Polish filmmaker Katarzyna Klimkiewicz, freely adapts the poem of “Acidente de viação”, by Wisława Szymborska. Right at the beginning, there is a car that skids off the road: we hear the sound and see someone running, but the accident happens out of the frame. Gradually, we realise that the film follows a family reunion at a holiday home in Chiloé. Women, men and children arrive, prepare a barbecue, walk through the dense nature and remember the past. Only Jaime is missing. As in the poem, we sense that a tragedy has occurred while they're draining the pasta, sweeping the leaves in the garden and the children running around screaming, but it's only five minutes before the end that we hear the news of the accident on the radio. The family is informed of Jaime's death in the final scene. The camera stays outside the house: we see the characters in the distance, through the window. The austerity of the framework aligns once again with the whispered sadness of the poem.

A few years later, Dominga Sotomayor films the daily life not only of one family, but of all of us on a global scale. Sin título, 2020 (2021) is a record of the turbulent passage of Covid-19 through our daily lives. An opera singer is isolated in a country house; when she receives the news of her grandson's birth, she goes with her youngest daughter to the city to carry a wicker cradle. She has permission to walk on the street for two hours. The roads are almost empty because of the lockdown. The cradle is pulled by a rope, the baby is shown on the balcony. Then, each one returns to their isolation with masks on their faces. Life and music, however, continue.

Correspondencia (2020) is an epistolary conversation with Carla Simón, a Spanish filmmaker who also works from her own experiences and memories. The two begin by rummaging through the past, through family films and old photographs, they talk about the past and the present, about the deaths of their grandmothers, mothers, and themselves, about the difficulties of reconciling cinema with motherhood. These film letters paint a broad generational portrait and, in a way, consecrate a passing of testimony. On the margins of this intimacy, the present explodes in the final shots. Dominga Sotomayor's camera is now on the move in the streets of Santiago de Chile and records the 2019 protests for the end of the last remnants of dictatorship and for a fairer Constitution that ensures a dignified life for all people. It is a beautiful line of escape.