More Festival and Industry Growth, Chile’s Film Prowess and This Year’s Highlights and Deals

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SANTIAGO, Chile — Climaxing Saturday night with an awards, ceremony, where Santiago Maza and Diego Luna passion project “State of Siege” took top honors, Santiago de Chile’s Sanfic and industry arm Sanfic Industria delivered a vibrant edition, confirming the joint event as one of the three key festival-markets in South America.

This year’s double event also reflects larger change at work coursing through industries in Latin America and much of international. Following, seven takeaways and highlights from the 2024 event, which runs Aug. 18-25 in Santiago de Chile.

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Sanfic Still Grows

Other key festivals around Latin America have seen their budgets slashed by governments, though the Rio de Janeiro Film Festival this October and Mexico’s Guadalajara Festival next June could be staging a comeback. Meanwhile, Sanfic and Sanfic Industria have held and indeed grown, recuperating pre-pandemic levels of 40,000 ticket sales by 2023.

Submissions for Sanfic Industria’s key sections, for example, were 55% up on 2023, said Gabriela Sandoval, Sanfic Industria head. That reflects the post-pandemic recovery of production in Latin America, plus the ever larger appeal of profile at Sanfic Industria, the key summer film industry event in South America.

“The general consensus was that the caliber of this year’s crop across the multiple sections was very high so we had to add new awards,” Sandoval told Variety, adding: “It’s the best edition we’ve had in terms of projects, players, new voices and incentives,” she added.

“We’ve grown in line with Chile’s industry,” Sanfic Carlos Nuñez said at an industry panel, Festivals Present and Future. Also, young audiences, 20-30s, are returning to cinema theaters and to Sanfic, he added. Just as streamers have grown audience interest in non-English language films and series, in Sanfic’s case they are warming to a lineup with a strong line in cinema not only from Chile but the rest of Latin America.

Punching Way Above Its Weight: Chile’s Film Industry

Sanfic kicked off last Sunday night with a tribute to Chile’s Pablo Larrain, Sebastián Lelio and Maite Alberdi. Between them, since 2012, with Larrain’s “NO,” their films have scored five Academy Award nominations, helping Chile to a best Oscar record since 2012 of any country in South America. Working in English with some of the finest women actors on the planet, producing probing portraits of iconic figures’ attempt to control their own image (“Jackie”) or lives (“Spencer,” “Disobedience,” “The Wonder”) or mixing non-fiction with fiction genres, whether an espionage imbroglio (“The Mole Agent”) or love story (“The Eternal Memory”), the trio have produced arguably the finest work of any association of filmmakers in Latin America. Little wonder Fremantle’s renewed recently its first look deal with the Larrains’ Fabula, behind the trio’s latest works.

Consumate Co-Producers

This is an age of co-production, to combat spiralling costs, make movies that can respond to their creators’ artistic ambitions, and to pool expertise. If so, Chile are consummate co-production practitioners, obliged for two decades to produce because of its relatively small domestic market. Nearly half of the industry news emerging from Sanfic Industria this year were international co-production deals, turned on some of its most seasoned experts, such as Quijote Films, the Chilean producers on “The Settlers.” Producers are also essaying new production models, such as yoking Belgian and Spanish tax breaks, in the case of Griselda González Gentile, who announced a new co-production, “Hollow Flowers,” at Sanfic Industria.

Talent in Depth

Chile is not just a case of three filmmakers who punch way above the country’s weight, however. There is a depth in the talent pool, highlighted at Sanfic and Sanfic Industria, which saw first feature filmmakers Laura Donoso and Alfredo Pourally grab prizes for their buzzed up debuts “Sariri” (best performance, Paolo Lattus, in the Chilean Film Competition) and “The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine” (best picture, shared with “Our Memory,” from Matías Rojas Valencia). In all 11 of the 13 Sanfic festival prize winners were first or second fiction, doc or solo feature titles, confirming Sanfic as a massive new talent platform.

Female Directors in Focus

A tradition at Sanfic Industria, a panel session brought together female filmmakers to discuss directing, film and series with a gender perspective and women’s “place” in creative processes. Moderated by Sandoval, speakers were Alberdi, Caro Bloj (“Sincronía”), Rocío García (“Pelokëlan”) and Luz Orlando Brennan (“La estrella que perdí”). Speakers were keen to emphasise both progress being made in gender issues and the long way still ahead. Five of the 10 titles at Sanfic Industria’s Ibero-American WIP were directed by women, Sandoval observed. García noted that industry bodies in Chile, such as producers’ org APCT, were discussing anti-gender abuse protocols, urging the audience to weigh in on them. “There is more parity but in reality it doesn’t exist,” said Alberdi, observing that 85% of U.S. films are directed by men. “I never felt discriminated in the industry until I became a mother and had to defend a lot of things which men do not, such as bringing my son on set,” she said. Parity is sometimes gauged by the number of female protagonists. “We don’t necessarily need female protagonists to represent our voice,” she added. “‘The Mole Agent’s’ main characters are men, but seen by me, from a feminist, female perspective.”

Sanfic Industria Highlight: Bina Daigeler

Madrid-based German costume designer Bina Daigeler, a 2024 Sanfic Industry Award recipient, gave an effective masterclass to keys to costume design, ranging from “Mulan,” on which she scored an Oscar nomination, to Todd Fields’ Cate Blanchett-starrer “Tar” to her films with Pedro Almodóvar: “All About My Mother,” “Volver” and his now Venice-bound “The Room Next Door.” One crux is preparation, from painstaking research to visiting China to prepare “Mulan” to detailed budgets which she can defend with producers to overseeing extras’ costumes. Another is reacting to directors and indeed actors’ visions of the films and characters. “My costumes must represent the interior world, psychology and sentiments of the actors,” Daigeler said in Chile. Also, “a costume designer must understand and present a director’s vision. Every director is their own world.”

The Deals

12 of the best, newly announced or reported in exclusivity by Variety at or in the run-up to this year’s Sanfic Industria:

*Ex-Pimienta Films executive producer Paulina Valencia has boarded Nicolasa Ruiz’s debut feature “The Weird” (“Lo Raro”), set up at Chile’s Cordyceps Content (“The Dog Thief”) headed by Matías de Bourguignon. Ruiz directed with Matt Porterfield, *2024 Cannes’ Critics Week short “Extinction of the Species.”

*Double Oscar nominee Maite Alberdi (“The Mole Agent,” “The Eternal Memory”) revealed to Variety details of her fiction film, the Netflix-backed “El Lugar de la Otra” (“In Her Place”) selected for main competition at San Sebastian.

*After Stephen King called “The Coffee Table” “horrible and also horribly funny. Think the Coen Brothers’ darkest dream,” Sanfic-Mórbido unveiled Caye Casas’ follow-up, “El Show del Gran Luciferio.”

*Adapting Chilean author Isabel Allende’s career-launching novel, Prime Video Original “The House of the Spirits’ has gone into production, with Francisca Alegría and Fernanda Urrejola (“The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future”) writing and also showrunning the series alongside seasoned local director/producer Andrés Wood (“News of a Kidnapping”).

*Chile’s Quijote Films has tapped Fabula’s Sergio Karmy to lead new growth plans.

*Chile’s Los Bunkers, one of the most admired of Latin America’s rock bands, has signed on to score “The Last Witness” (“El Ultimo Testigo”), a doc feature portrait of Luis Poirot, who has snapped Allende on the campaign trail, a radiant Victor Jara and Pablo Neruda at his writing desk down to the 2019 social protest Estallido and to this day.

*Chile’s Juntos Films, Colombia’s Angie Cepeda and Juan Pablo Raba have joined “Domestic Animals,” one of the highest-profile titles at Sanfic Fiction Lab Project. Directed by Rafael Martínez Moreno, pic is set up at Colombia’s Ferviente Films.

*Santiago Lab Fiction entry “Cupid’s arrow,” the directorial debut of Chile’s Ernesto Melendez, winner of the Guadalajara Co-Production Meeting Award, has signed key cast in Aline Kuppenheim (“1976”), Alejandro Goic (“1976”) and Francisca Gavilán (“Violeta Went to Heaven”). They have also secured the soundtrack rights to the music of iconic 1960s Chilean artist, Cecilia la Incomparable, aka Cecila Pantoja. Story revolves around a foreign actor starring in an erotic gay film who falls for the co-star, his brother-in-law.

*Sanfic Lab Fiction participant “Here is Better Than There,” directed by JP Echeverría Echegoyen and produced by Alejandro Ugarte and Infractor Films, about a couple whose lives are upended by a violent alcoholic tenant, has confirmed the casting of Juan Pablo Ogalde, (“Paraiso B”). Project is selected for the Venice Production Bridge.

*Madrid’s Luminosa Venture Films is set to co-produce hyped trans-media animation project “Hollow Flowers.”

*Germany’s Weltfilm is teaming with Bolivia’s CQ Films, Argentina’s Maravillacine and France’s L’Œil Vif to back Martín Boulocq’s “Criminal Body,” which played to an upbeat reception at Sanfic Industria’s Ibero-American Work in Progress.

*Starring International Emmy nominated Daniela Ramirez (“Isabel: The Intimate Story of Isabel Allende”), sci-fi thriller “La Isla” will roll in Southern Chile from October. Penned by Felipe Carmona (“Prison in the Andes”) the series is directed by Rodrigo Susarte (“Gen Mishima,” “Invunche”) and produced and showrun by Pablo Díaz del Rio at Chile’s Rio Estudios.

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