Too Late to Die Young

At the dry foothills of the mountain range, in the summer of 1990, a provisional community rehearses the promise of a nascent world. A makeshift village gradually takes shape, and on the edge of this community laboratory, children and teenagers discover how to inhabit a territory where everything seems temporary, and everything seems to be just beginning.

We approach Sofía, who seems to be waiting for a love that is coming, a language that she hasn't quite grasped yet, the improvised parties, the music, the shared silences, the small uncalculated cruelties. Everything works as a rehearsal for the future. The community discusses water supply, the fires that surround summer, and the precarious balance of routine. The houses, still under construction, cover the empty walls with transparent plastic. And Sofía navigates the interior of another border with the same hesitation. It is called adolescence, or a country in transition. The energy that demands form.

The film treats the surface of reality as fragile sediment. The heat, the dust, the smoke, the textures of the sun, the slowness of the afternoon are elements that bring the viewer closer to the materiality of a summer that burns. There is no external explanation that organises this world. Meaning arises from accumulated details. The world is not built on metaphors. The world emerges in short intervals, when light filters through the dust.

The date is more than just a mere circumstance. At the turn of the 1980s to the 1990s, the country breathed an air of first democratic rehearsal, as if it were relearning how to inhabit the common. Pinochet is never mentioned. There is no transparency in this process. There are grey areas, advances and retreats, illusions and hesitations. The community that gathers on the hillside functions as a model of a social pact that is being rebuilt, without a great programme, without a closed narrative. Adolescence and the dawn of democracy share the same temporal regime, the same contiguity. A country and a young woman search for language, search for form, search for a way to inhabit a future that still lacks a lexicon. There are bodies that grow, there are pacts that are reconfigured, there are continuities that fall apart throughout the film, which is built on simultaneity.

Dominga Sotomayor films uncertainty with rare precision. Each plan seems to collect particles of memory that, although unexplained, persist. The moving image becomes here an exercise in sensoriality, of microscopic attention to the way a world organises itself on the plane of perceptions. What we see is a way of life that is being invented, where teenagers and adults seek a possible model of community. This search is the pulse of the film.

When the fire finally devours the air, something is revealed, almost as if what burns was what existed in a latent state. The flame illuminates the precariousness of things. The flame illuminates risk. The flame illuminates waiting. Sofía, under a waterfall, looks at the world like someone deciphering the first image of the future.

The film ends without a summary, without closure. Perhaps because there is no closure for processes that are still germinating. The community continues. Sofía continues. The country continues. The cinema that observes these transformations also continues. Childhood ends, democracy begins, utopia abandons the certainty of a map and takes the form of an open path.

A trail of dust that climbs the hillside. A morning that restarts after the fire. A promise that chooses to remain unfulfilled.