Treatment

The starting point are the home archives filmed by my uncle since the ’90s, who has been doing this practice for 50 years, to save for the future, as he himself says. Hi-8 cameras, Mini-dv and nowadays mobile phones are the formats that go through his collection perfectly organized in folders by year, which is how he gave them to me on a hard disk the day he passed them on to me. From these images, reactions, thoughts, meditations in filmic forms emerge. Reactions in the form of montage, cuts, sounds and even new recordings to be made, elements that I will develop in the following text.

The Material/Image

Many years ago, my uncle Jorge gave me a hard disk with all the images he had filmed throughout his life. As I reviewed the footage, I was surprised by my uncle’s obsession with filming everything. He had a large filmed diary of his and our family’s life. I could never forget these images and went back to them as soon as I could. When I look at them, I am taken back by the simplicity and love in what he films. Definitely those images was never made for a movie, so why was my uncle, who never had any interest in cinema, filming?

Enchanted by those images, I am surprised by a gunshot in the air in the middle of a New Year’s party. Then I remember my family’s police tradition. In that contradiction these images are moving, in that tension their meanings are at stake. The power of the material is the mixture between the love of these men and the violence they irradiate at the same time. And not only as policemen but also as men and the patriarchy they exert in each of these images.


The ’90s portrayed by my accountant uncle, in a popular family of policemen, seem a caricature of machismo and the false «Chilean indebted middle class”. At other times my uncle is alone at home with his family. There he films his intimate diary. The daily life of his home, hours and hours, years and years spent in his intimacy, many cities, houses, yards, children. A diary that reminds me of Perlov’s diaries and the question of drinking or filming the soup.


All of my uncle’s material, the stories, the encounters, are extremely crossed by laughter, jokes and a characteristic humor of the characters, policemen and non-police, that we are going to watch. I am interested in following this laughter, to vindicate, to build this party in opposition to the world and the obvious tensions that cross the days, the families, the society.


We see a daily material, year after year, the repetition of the party, of the family, of the food. The passage of time that is felt as 10 years go by, then another 10 years, and another 10 years more. Those who were children are young now. A cousin dies, a grandfather dies, a baby is born. The material lets you feel the time pass and the gravity of life in it.

On the other hand, these images open my family history, the space that built me. I have the in me, I was raised by them. I was also filmed by muy uncle, next to my uncles policemen, next to their guns, their stories arresting neighbors, I enjoyed the stories next to the grill, listening how they got a promotion, how they emerged from poverty thanks to the police work. The one day muy uncle filmed me when I was 14 years old. It was Christmas and my gift was a camera.


My uncle films me with my new camera and the film is now shot with my hand and my eyes.The material changes. They are archives between 2019 and 2021 that I filmed with a small crew, following several cases of political prisoners of the revolt. They are files between 2019 and 2021 that I filmed with a small crew, following several cases of political prisoners of the revolt (last big manifestation) in Chile. It is a nervous and emotional material. Like my uncle I comment several times behind the camera. I also talk and eat with the camera in my hand. A camera that breathes in my hand, that is erratic in my hand, that goes to places it shouldn’t be too. These materials are in justice courts, places full of lawyers and judges where law and laws are discussed.


Then other materials are from different meetings over the course of two years, street rallies to protest for the freedom of political prisoners. We are almost always 15 or 20 people. We cut the street, we shout, we light a fire. The police arrive. We start up.

The Possible Journey/The Montage

The journey will go from the familiarity of these images, their normality, to gradually defamiliarizing them. Another tone present in this film will be the intimate diary of the uncle, following his spontaneous self-recording, without any cinematographic desire.

We will build from this line the characters, their growth, their changes of looks, their stories, the history of this family, of some of its characters, of the family environment recorded lovingly and exhaustively by my uncle for more than 30 years, the construction of these stories, the repetition of one year after another, one party after another, is faded by the small differences in this repetition. The small variations in the repetition cause the breaks in the apparent normality of a life. One such variation is the arrival of my first camera. I am 14 years old and my uncle films me with this camera for the first time.


The film enters a visual limbo that happens around the transformation of the look. The film has a rupture and a radical change, it seems that another film begins, now filmed by me, where we are on the side of the prisoners and no longer on the side of the police. This break, from the archive and the history of my police family and the apparent everyday life, to my present filming the political prison and the dissolution and re-foundation of the police of the police, help me to feel the inner fragmentation, and at the same time the step towards a look of my own. But that fragmentation is perhaps not only interior, but also the evidence of a fracture in the world.


I think that the montage of my uncle’s archive will be more based on the passage of time, and of building the warmth and comfort of a family life, of feeling the archives and their familiarity. In the break with the change of camera to my own, I think I can work with the materials in a more plastic montage, of shocks and sensorial constructions, of much more subjectivity.