El Pejesapo, The Frogfish

The first collaboration between Sepúlveda (direction) and Adriazola (production) begins, naturally, with an ending. A man lies motionless on the stony banks of a river on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile, as though washed ashore. We soon learn that he has tried to commit suicide, and hear him say that he remembers nothing prior to the event. This film can be read as a backwards retracing of what could have led this man to a failed suicide attempt—a journey towards the source, from the outskirts to the city centre. The events do not unfold in reverse, but the editing, by rejecting any causal linearity, maps the character’s discontinuities and contradictions. The structure, which diverges from conventional dramatic principles, and the disjointed editing (two constants in the duo’s work) act like a scalpel on the body of the actor/character (Héctor Silva / Daniel SS). To the vein of direct cinema, this first work superimposes the creation of simulated situations which serve as a basis for improvisation — another process that has become central to the duo’s work. The dialogues take on a performative character: they are more valuable for what they provoke than for what they signify. The film starts to affect the work of the actor and the directors, rather than the other way round. Making a film becomes an act of entering into an open, visceral process, without rules.

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