From June 1 to 30, Cinema Network Month is celebrated with nearly 50 national and international titles exhibited in the 16 theaters from Arica to Coyhaique that make up the Network along with five other collaborating theaters that are currently in the process of joining the association, highlighting among them the exhibition of an unpublished national premiere: Martian Pampas. A mix of genres between science fiction and documentary that featured the participation of more than sixty inhabitants of the Pampina commune of María Elena, who by acting managed to lose the limit between reality and the cinematographic world.
Theater Network Month is carried out with the purpose of celebrating cinema in its different manifestations and, at the same time, surveying attendance at local exhibition halls, promoting the social and cultural importance of these spaces throughout from the country. The initiative is financed by the Support Program for Collaborating Cultural Organizations, Call 2023, of the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage.
Directed by Aníbal Jofré (Volantín short, 2013) and produced by Felipe Morgado (Oasis2024), martian pampas is a feature film that combines different genres to talk about the precariousness and abandonment in the north of Chile and the delirium that living in the middle of the Atacama Desert generates. martian pampas It was carried out collaboratively between the MAFI Collective and the community of María Elena, in the Antofagasta Region. “When we filmed it was the same neighbors who starred in the scenes, they took the cameras and microphones, they improvised, they had ideas and we filmed them. The entire production process was collaborative, where the idea of authorship fades and films are made from what we feel and imagine together, as a political gesture, as a question about the future,” he says. Felipe Morgado, producer of the film.
Martian Pampas documents a space trip in which the inhabitants of María Elena leave the saltpeter pampas to become the first humans to colonize Mars. The plot of the film is inspired by the abandonment suffered by the extreme areas of the country that must survive oblivion and the precariousness of life in isolation under the rigors of the climate crisis. “The Eleninos themselves speak to us in the 21st century about the need for independence of the SQM company, which owns not only the only economic activity in the place, but also the entire camp: water, electricity, houses and streets,” he comments. your director Aníbal Jofré.
The film is on a tour of the country with screenings in Antofagasta, Valparaíso, Santiago, Constitución, Puerto Montt and Coyhaique. In Valparaíso the premiere will take place with a cinema forum at INSOMNIA Teatro Condell this Tuesday, June 18 at 7:00 p.m.
“Sharing the film and being able to talk after each screening is a gift for us as filmmakers. Unexpected ideas, new questions and readings always appear that make the reflections that were once born in the middle of the desert grow. We owe that to the experience of watching movies in a theater with more people, as a collective experience just like the Martian Pampas is,” adds Jofré.
Prior to this film, the short film is being shown Phantasmagoria, directed by Juan Francisco González, and which addresses a similar theme, revealing the vestiges of the last saltpeter industry; and which received the Citizen Jury Honorable Mention during Fecich 2023. The ticket has a value of $2000 and is available for in-person sale at the Teatro Condell box office.
