By Alicia Sánchez Gómez |
New York, June 8 (EFE).- The most incendiary Chile took center stage this Saturday at the Tribeca festival in New York, where Nicolás Molina presented his new documentary ‘Pirópolis’, a story of the flames that frequently consume the port city from Valparaíso and that also emerge from the Chileans themselves.
Molina portrays “the city of fire” from the point of view of a firefighter unit preparing to quell forest fires, against the backdrop of the social outbreak of 2019 in which thousands of Chileans took to the streets to ask shouts a new Constitution.
‘Pirópolis’ and its premiere
The premiere of the documentary takes place a few months after several fires in February killed more than a hundred people in Valparaíso, although this event did not coincide with filming.
In contrast to the situation of the city, which due to its climate and other factors is prone to suffer this type of phenomena, the work of firefighter in Chile is voluntary: professionals do not receive any remuneration and have less state support, which makes his in a very precarious profession.
With this premise, ‘Pirópolis’ talks about firefighters, the forest fire and the flames that set an entire town on fire: “(the 2019 protests) were an important symbol and made the film acquire another, much more predominant social dimension.” explains the director, originally from Santiago, in an interview with EFE.
A town that also burns
To show the burning part of Valparaíso, Molina, dressed in a firefighter’s suit and after undergoing training, enters the dangerous flames with the team from the Fifth Company brigade.
However, this was not the moment of greatest fear for the Santiago resident, but rather one of the protests that flooded the streets of Valparaíso in 2019, a historical moment that directly connects with the flames.
“There is a connection between this (social) unrest and the fires, which has to do with the inequality of this country and how that has led people to live in these places,” he says.
With his words, the director refers to the hills that surround Valparaíso, which are inhabited, above all, by people with few economic resources and who on numerous occasions are among the most affected by the fires.
Molina, who in his previous works also explores invisible communities or professions, says he is very curious about “the purely cinematographic” aspects or customs of Chile that are invisible to the foreign eye.
For his part, fire seemed “multidimensional” to him: “I really wanted to experience that contradiction of fire, in the sense that it is destructive but hypnotic at the same time,” he explains.
And more specifically, he claims to be very curious about the impact of fire on the population: “In Valparaíso everyone has a story with a fire. “Every neighbor has a friend, a cousin or a brother who has been affected by it.”
Of “the city of fire,” Molina is left with its beauty and with the opportunity it has given him to observe closely and understand what is happening there: “Movies make you live exceptional adventures and enter places where one It wouldn’t fit normally. “That’s the beauty of making movies.”
