Santiago, 2018, and roiling student protests highlight ongoing state violence and the criminalization of dissent in Diego Ayala and Aníbal Jofre‘s latest feature,” The Affections” (“Los Afectos”), bowing in competition alongside nine Chilean projects at the Santiago Int’l Film Festival (Sanfic).
Having met in film school, this is the pair’s second feature following their 2013 feature-length title, “Volantín Cortao,” which was selected for Locarno’s Carte Blanche and saw a debut at the Rome Film Festival.
Produced by Valentina Roblero Arellano and Francisca Mery at Chile’s Orion Cine and co-produced by Ecuador’s Incubadora, the film follows school inspector Benajmín (Gastón Salgado) amidst the unrest as student pushback simmers and he grows weary of his daughter Karina’s (Catalina Ríos) close friend Iván (Gianluca Abarza), who encourages her bold activism. When she’s killed by authorities during a demonstration, he’s challenged to reevaluate long-held beliefs.
The project delicately portrays the inner workings of its protagonist as he struggles with the rigid responsibilities of his job while navigating the state-mandated violence that claimed his daughter. A collective commentary via individual soul-searching and communal mourning, the characters live within constraints both self-inflicted and socially infused.
At the center of that struggle during her adolescence, Roblero Arellano told Variety that “learning about a project that focused on the people who make up a society, hand-in-hand with the style of sensitive realism that directors have been working on in their cinematography, captured my interest.”
“Since then, we’ve worked mobilized by the affections as a banner of struggle, turning the difficult path of production into an exquisite process of cinematic thought, where elements such as music have appeared, disrupting the language with a fissure in reality,” she continued.
With no shortage of big-screen representation of the country’s dogged upheaval in circulation, “The Affections” proves a uniquely sobering, class-conscious dive into the consequence of holding onto the ignorance that fuels hatred, doing so from the dissonant and nearly suffocating first-hand perspective of its tortured male lead and the teenagers he’s meant to look after.
“In the process of making the film, we always wanted to approach the scenes from the intimacy of the characters. We were interested in seeing what was happening in the high school hallway, in personal conversations, not in a full classroom. Coexistence is something that we’ve always been interested in exploring in our films; in this case, it was a light to read Humberto Maturana’s definition of education: ‘It’s a transformation in coexistence,’” Ayala relayed.
The frenetic narrative additionally challenges apathetic and absent old-guard masculinity, as we see the youth more structured and apt than their adult counterparts at several points throughout the film. The collapse of the father figures on screen is juxtaposed with the strength of encouraged adolescent empathy.
“Benjamín’s character, played wonderfully by Gastón Salgado, tries to address a generation that grew up in a paradigm where the masculine renounced the emotional and its excesses, but that faces a new paradigm, where young people do give more space to sensitivity, how they can learn from that too,” Ayala explained.
“This process isn’t immediate and involves difficult situations, big changes in perspectives. Sometimes, there are things that can’t be recovered; you have to learn to live with it. In ‘The Affections,’ there’s a space to allow yourself to change within the masculine,” he added.
Raw hip-hop vignettes and spoken-word beats appear throughout, conduits for the immense grief and tempered anger that elevate the narrative and support the ongoing metamorphosis of characters’ personal and political traumas.
“The film is a champurria of audiovisual genres, neither purist nor elegant, it’s not interested in remaining cynical in its perspective, but rather it positions itself as militant cinema – so beaten many times – that’s honest for the moment we’re living in, in which it was shot,” Jofre mused.
“The incorporation of great artists like Gianluca and Sara Hebe responds to this concern of exploring expressive possibilities where realism fell short of the horror of what happened. This is how musical sequences are born in search of a different depth, to reach true and important feelings,” he added.
With the project, Ayala and Jofre champion diverse perspectives. The film, globally relevant, as governments seek to restrict the expression present in independent, regional cinema, threatening to silence the communities most in need of an equitable portrayal and fueling a call for strength in numbers.
“A healthy ecosystem is one in which there’s great diversity and coexistence of multiple forms of life. What’s happening in many countries is very serious and these regimes are varied in their appearances. It’s a matter of seeing what Milei is doing in Argentina; I say you don’t have to go that far. I think it’s a constant threat, and we need to generate networks of global solidarity,” Jofre explained.
“These types of works are fundamental because they contrast with the mass communication of the media and social networks where a small, millionaire percentage of the population is represented, where images of the working classes are reduced to moral judgments or charity. As filmmakers, we’re inspired by our environment. Paraphrasing the great Lucrecia Martel, ‘the first reference must always be our own territory.’”
