Cine Chileno • Bonus Inside

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Here is your guide to the dark, beautiful, and surreal world of Chilean film. You cannot understand modern Chilean cinema without understanding Augusto Pinochet’s regime (1973–1990). Unlike other countries that processed their historical trauma immediately, Chile had to wait. The result is a cinema of indirection and allegory . cine chileno

Take Pablo Larraín, arguably Chile’s most famous director. Instead of making a standard war film about the coup, he made Tony Manero (2008)—a claustrophobic portrait of a sociopath obsessed with John Travolta in 1978 Santiago. It’s not about politics on the surface, but the air of paranoia and moral rot is suffocating. Larraín followed this up with the masterpiece No (2012), starring Gael García Bernal as an ad man who uses pop culture to defeat a dictator in a referendum. It’s a true story, and it proves that sometimes, a rainbow logo is more powerful than a gun. While Larraín handles the political, Sebastián Lelio handles the human heart. Welcome to