Notes for the future

Three brothers, hunters, and heavy metal fans struggle with their issues in the dense Argentinian Patagonia. Meanwhile, the neighboring river threatens their farm with a flooding that can ruin their harvest.

After a fire destructed my house, I return to the places where I grew up looking for childhood recollections. In this journey appears the memory of a photo for Karin Eitel, a young woman, tortured and detained during the dictatorship, to whom I owe my name. A story that my parents never told me, brings me closer to Karin and not just because of my name. In the background, the memory of a childhood in Chile, a country that reconstructed its democracy omitting its own history.

When his cross-dressing teenage son suffers a brutally violent attack, a mannequin-factory manager desperately seeks help and, when none can be found, is forced to take matters into his own hands.

While Thomas spends his last weekend in Chile with his family, before traveling abroad for the first time, a flaw in the sewage system produces a flood of smelly water. The problem shows the essence of family relationships.

Known for their ranching abilities and their endurance under extreme weather conditions, both Joaquín and Victor leave their families behind to pursue their dreams of earning enough money to buy land of their own back in Chile.

This documentary, made entirely of archival footage shot mainly by amateurs, revisits 50 years of Chilean history. A fascinating lesson in memory, this personal montage adopts a popular, even fringe, perspective to help write a more complete national memory. As the filmmaker asserts in her narration, there’s the history we’re told, the history we live, and the history we tell ourselves. Between the coup d’état of September 11, 1973, and the recent double failure of the new constitution project, this film shows that the people of Chile have long oscillated between excitement and disappointment, accumulating shattered hopes. Rejecting the pessimism that would trap us in collective immobility, Karin Cuyul instead draws on the past to ask how we can continue to dream of the necessary social and political changes.