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Paulina García, who won the Berlinale’s 2013 best actress Silver Bear for her role in Sebastián Lelio’s Chilean drama “Gloria,” is starring in and executive producing Matías Rojas Valencia’s “Our Memory” (“Nuestra Memoria”).
The documentary-hybrid is based on Rojas’ research into a powerful enclave in southern Chile and the influence it continues to have on the country — subject matter that he also explores in his latest feature, “A Place Called Dignity.”
“Our Memory” is a film “that defies cinematic genres,” producer Clara Larraín of Santiago-based Clara Films told Reporter Door. It was written and directed by Rojas and is produced by Larraín and Tomas Gerlach of A Simple Vista.
In the fiction part of “Our Memory,” García plays a woman who is suffering from Alzheimer illness, who needs for some reason to enter a forest to unearth a secret and ask for forgiveness for something that has weighed in her all her life.
The documentary strand turns on Ingrid Zsurgelies, 70, and Franz Baar, 68, who survived decades of slavery at Chile’s heinous Colonia Dignidad, an colony established in the 1960s by a German ex-Nazi cult leader Paul Schäfer.
“This is film which in the mix of formats and genres drives deep into memory, the wounds, scars and search for redemption,” Rojas Valencia commented.
Tomas Gerlach Mora, Clara Larrain, Matias Rojas
Courtesy of Clara Films
Currently in post-production, the project is taking part in the upcoming Baltic Event Co-Production Market, which runs Nov. 23-25 as part of Estonia’s Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, where Rojas’ sophomore feature, “A Place Called Dignity,” will premiere in competition.
Produced by Giancarlo Nasi’s Santiago-based Quijote Films and inspired by true events, “A Place Called Dignity” is told through the eyes of a young boy who is forced to experience one of the darkest episodes in Chile’s recent history when he attends school at Colonia Dignidad.
Clara Films is also developing Rojas’ forthcoming fourth feature, “El Bosque Arderá.” In the same way that “Our Memory” is linked to “A Place Called Dignity,” so too is “El Bosque Arderá” linked to Rojas’ 2013 debut film “Root,” a road movie about a young woman and a small boy who set off on a journey through the remote landscapes of southern Chile in search of the child’s father.
Rojas is “generating a very interesting filmography,” Larrain added.
“Root” premiered at San Sebastian in 2013 and went on to win the best Chilean film prize at the Valdivia Film Festival.
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