Drawing a map that cannot be reduced to one perspective may take more than one author indeed. “Mapa filmico de un pais”, “filmic map of a country” is the long name of the MAFI collective formed by seventeen Chilean filmmakers. The map they draw combines places, things and religious acts on a flat surface, without hierarchies, classifications, evaluations: This exists here and this here, but then there is also that. There are statues of the Virgin Mary, pious songs and lonely prayers, but also burnt-down churches and a blasphemous comedian dressed as Jesus. A collage emerges that is also the picture of a conflict.

The Pope’s visit to Chile in 2018 serves as leitmotif and fire accelerant. The fault lines become sharper: dogmatic conservatism against emancipatory potential, polymorphic popular belief against unified religion as a media spectacle. Thousands cheer the Papamobil, but in the foreground unimpressed skaters practice their jumps. The Pope is probably lost to capitalism, but is this true of faith in general?

Lukas Foerster

Paula Yermén is a transsexual who lives in a seedy suburb of Santiago de Chile. Her personal drama is poverty, because the operation that would make her a complete woman isn’t free. Paula’s only chance is a reality show that would pay for a sex change – at the price of baring her body and soul to the audience. Like Paula’s sex, which is somehow “in-between”, the directors have chosen an in-between narrative format: diary clips shot by Paula with her camcorder, own documentary material and discretely re-enacted moments, for example between Paula and her lover. This method makes sense, since the film is the result of a two-year co-operation with Paula. She is less a classical protagonist than the actor of herself in the minefield of traditional social preconceptions. Her longing to re-invent herself in a new body is in strange contrast to her spiritual attitude, which goes back to her half-indigenous origins. The spirits she invokes for help speak to the soul, not to a mechanically manufactured new body. But this is an insight Paula can’t reach until she fails the casting process and has no way out any more.
Matthias Heeder

Humanity intends to travel to Mars: tabula rasa with civilisation. Social avant-garde. The planets grow together, but the future is slow in coming. The sniffer dog Valyente does his job at the Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago de Chile, checking rows of chairs and settees for explosives. The dog is from Haiti, just like Petit-Frère Wilner who, like many of his compatriots, immigrated to Chile. He works as a gas station attendant at night and as the editor of a magazine for the Haitian community during the day. It’s published in Creole and Valyente got his own article there, too.

Guided by Petit-Frère’s offscreen voice, Roberto Collío and Rodrigo Robledo paint a splintered image of the Haitian immigrant community in Chile which deliberately refuses to be traced to a stable perspective: we see brass bands and swimming races, satellite and silent film images, documents of the past and visions of the future – associative and free, half research, half dream. Reality is the imaginary object of the search for it. There is no access, but there is always the chance to film it.

Lukas Stern