Like Emily, another premiere of the week, 1976 also marks the debut of an actress, in this case Chilean Manuela Martelli. Inspired by her own grandmother, 1976 is a promising debut – selected for Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and a candidate for a Goya for Best Ibero-American Film – about a woman who doesn’t quite fit in with her surroundings. In this way, Martelli uses the intimate and the domestic to create a thriller that uncovers the horrors of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. The title, 1976, is as short and eloquent as its main character, a mute middle-class housewife in the skin of a great Aline Küppenheim, who begins three years after Allende’s death and the same year that another military coup broke out, that of Argentina to incubate a nagging sense of rebellion.
More information
Martelli focuses on his main character to parade through the filthy society that supported Pinochet’s neoliberal dictatorship and also through the fringes of the clandestine resistance. Through a wealthy Santiago family renovating their second home near the sea, this nucleus and its satellites (friends, the housekeeper, the work crew…) act as metaphors for a regime that has enforced its model with blood. The film transports the viewer into the wealthy hall of the putschists, an uncanny solace into which Martelli places his quiet and uncomfortable heroine: an elegant and mature woman, enormously attractive and reserved, who decides against all odds to venture out and meet a boy help fighters pursued by the police.
1976 portrays a patriarchal and paternalistic country that treats its women like fools and lunatics through minute details of everyday life, with little dialogue and an oppressive atmosphere. This, in the eyes of her people, is this bourgeois woman of whom we know very little, only that she has suffered a severe crisis in the past and who now spends her time and good taste choosing the color of the walls and with them to work together Red Cross and take care of their grandchildren.
More information
Subtle and elegant like its protagonist, 1976 contains moments as powerful and violent as the boat sequence that causes a woman, accustomed to silence, perhaps her only refuge, to vomit. A woman of pearls and mass who becomes aware of the regime of terror in which she lives by caring for an unknown young man.
1976
Direction: Manuela Martell.
Actor: Aline Küppenheim, Nicolás Sepúlveda, Hugo Medina, and Alejandro Goic.
Gender: Thriller. Chile, 2022.
Duration: 95 minutes.
Platform: filmin.
Premiering: January 13.
All the culture that suits you awaits you here.
Subscribe to
Babelia
The literary novelties analyzed by our best critics in our weekly bulletin
GET IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits