Pequén Producciones

Nicolás Molina’s visually astounding Pirópolis drops the viewer in the fiery port city of Valparaíso, Chile and observes a pack of determined volunteer firefighters as they band together to combat turbulent wildfires ravaging the city.

After a fire destructed my house, I return to the places where I grew up looking for childhood recollections. In this journey appears the memory of a photo for Karin Eitel, a young woman, tortured and detained during the dictatorship, to whom I owe my name. A story that my parents never told me, brings me closer to Karin and not just because of my name. In the background, the memory of a childhood in Chile, a country that reconstructed its democracy omitting its own history.

After my grandmother’s death I begin to question our gender roles between her generation and mine. Reflections, voice notes and 8mm files of women from different times try to define what they were in their time and what we long for in ours.

This documentary, made entirely of archival footage shot mainly by amateurs, revisits 50 years of Chilean history. A fascinating lesson in memory, this personal montage adopts a popular, even fringe, perspective to help write a more complete national memory. As the filmmaker asserts in her narration, there’s the history we’re told, the history we live, and the history we tell ourselves. Between the coup d’état of September 11, 1973, and the recent double failure of the new constitution project, this film shows that the people of Chile have long oscillated between excitement and disappointment, accumulating shattered hopes. Rejecting the pessimism that would trap us in collective immobility, Karin Cuyul instead draws on the past to ask how we can continue to dream of the necessary social and political changes.