Cuadro negro, Cuadro Negro

This latest film by Adriazola ands Sepúlveda is a summa bringing together certain thematic motifs from their work: the gulf between the person and the mask, and how that space can be harnessed to produce anarchic and destabilising situations where the boundaries between pretence and reality are torn down by a satire so ferocious that it no longer seems to be one. In Cuadro negro, un proyecto infernal, the production of an “artistic documentary” about the Chilean army serves as a fabulist framework for portraying not only its protagonist – another memorable female character in the duo’s filmography (the impressive Sofía Paloma Gómez) – but a whole society. The country is gripped by a systemic crisis, and each shot exudes an air of catastrophe. The protagonist acts as a pivot around which revolve the most antagonistic identities a society can produce: from a grandmother who feels as if she is being watched and fears for her life, as if living under dictatorship, to a group of old women who are nostalgic for Pinochetism. Her work as a documentarist allows Sofía to give orders to soldiers, but also immerses her in a humiliating atmosphere. This polarity and the film’s historical thrust are duly introduced by the double meaning of the title: Cuadro Negro refers to the oldest equestrian acrobatic unit of the Chilean army, but also alludes to an absent, hidden event, so macabre that it cannot be depicted.

Rarely shown outside of Latin America, the films of Chilean duo Carolina Adriazola and José Luis Sepúlveda form one of the most stimulating and difficult to classify oeuvres in contemporary cinema. From the visceral El pejesapo (2007) to the wildly virtuosic Cuadro negro (winner of the Grand Prize at the 2025 Punto de Vista Festival), the FID is pleased to present the very first major European retrospective of their work. 

Adriazola and Sepúlveda’s first films, belonging neither strictly to fiction or documentary, can be seen as detailed studies of the sense of malaise that gave rise to the 2011 protests and 2019 uprising in Chile, a country where stark social inequalities have persisted since the military dictatorship of 1973-1990. Aligned with social movements that over the last decades have given tangible form to popular discontent, resisting the pressures of one of the most violent examples of neoliberalism in the world, Adriazola and Sepúlveda have always worked independently of the film industry. They have instead established self-managed, horizontal production and distribution processes, such as FECISO-Festival de Cine Social y Antisocial, which has brought cinema to outlying communities since 2007, or the Escuela Popular de Cine (Popular Film School), which has fostered collaboration and creation in the heart of communities, free of charge, for the last 15 years.  

The work of Adriazola and Sepúlveda ventures onto slippery ground and into obscure areas where fiction rarely dares to tread. It develops unorthodox performative practices and confronts—with rage and humour—the supposed hierarchies on both sides of the camera as well as the immutability of social and cultural roles. As the Chilean researcher Iván Pinto points out, it is not so different to the metadiscursive corrosion of political cinema as seen in the early work of Raúl Ruiz, or the Colombian Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo’s critique of pornomiseria. A recurring gesture in several of Adriazola and Sepúlveda’s films is to hand the camera to those being filmed: a way of highlighting the impossibility of painting a complete or definitive portrait of a community that is never viewed without ambiguity. This is also a way of breaking down the boundaries between inside and outside, and with it, any comfortable distance. The unique political force of Adriazola and Sepúlveda’s films, their resistance to any ideological crystallisation, and aversion to any kind of paternalism, might only be equalled by Glauber Rocha, whom they admire, and who, perhaps in anticipation of such films, once called for a cinema that would dare to be “imprecise, vague, barbarous, irrational.”

Manuel Asín