At 13 years old, Ariel Mateluna was about to leave his house to play ball with his friends but the ringing of the phone interrupted him. He thought that perhaps they were going to accuse him of some broken glass in the neighborhood, however, they were looking for him to inform him that he had been preselected in a casting that he had gone to seven months ago.
The next day he had to go back to the audition, he quickly wrote down the address and when he finally left his house with the ball in his arms he told his friends who were impatiently waiting for him outside: “They called me to appear in a movie!” , laughing, they responded: “Go out there” and they went to play. The teenagers had no way of knowing that Mateluna was going to play Pedro Machuca, one of the most recognized characters in cinema about dictatorship in Chile.
Directed by Andrés Wood, the film It hurts (2004) portrays the political and social environment in Chile in the early 1970s. The story begins when a group of students from lower social strata enter the Saint Patrick’s school – a campus attended by upper-class students. There the friendship between Gonzalo Infante and the newcomer Pedro Machuca is born.
20 years after the premiere of “Machuca,” the actor reflects on the legacy of fiction and what it meant for his career.
“The film remained in people’s retinas, in the collective unconscious because it touches that wound, that gap that does not change,” says the actor from the Sala Insomnia in Valparaíso where he participated in a cineforum after the cinema showed “Machuca.”
Within the framework of the Movie Theater Network Month and the 20th anniversary of the premiere of “Machuca,” the actor will be in different cities in Chile participating in conversations with the public after the fiction is shown.
“It is one of the most important films in Chilean cinema, it is a film that talks about the history of Chile and that is also shown for foreign countries, it is like a reference to history, class inequality and also the time of the beginning of the UP and subsequent coup d’état,” he adds.
Furthermore, he indicates that “it comes from the peak moment where everything began to get worse perhaps for the working class, which was the moment of the coup d’état intervention. Because also, the poor, the proletariat were a conscious and educated people. In “The Battle of Chile” you can see how people in the towns speak, the shots have a much broader vocabulary than they have now. And that is also influenced by the fact that during the dictatorship they put the base dough into the populations and that was the end of any ideal, any collective thought of wanting to make a change in communion.”
In that sense, the actor points out that thinking about the film again 20 years later “brings a little bit of nostalgia and memories.”
“You also realize that time flies. And it also gives you a little bit of an impression that a film that is set almost 60 years ago and that it has been 20 years since it was released and things are almost the same as always: classism, segregation. It is a bit sad that society does not make much progress on social issues,” she adds.
The actor says that they continue to recognize him for his role in Machuca, they tell him that he has the same look as 20 years ago.
“The film marked a before and after in my life. Although my life remains the same, I have moved a couple of times, but I live where I am, I have the same friends. “My thoughts never went to my head,” she says. Despite his young age at the time of recording his first film, he did not shy away from acting, Mateluna has worked in television and film. She participated in the cast of MEA culpaEscapees, Huaiquimán and Tolosa, The Queen of Franklin, La Verónica, Mala Junta, Neruda, The Movie Teller, among other productions.
“I realized that I began to choose projects where people would be aware and create awareness to generate changes and to awaken people’s minds a little bit. With “Mala Junta” it happened to me that they had called me for a series on TVN where they paid me good money. lucas but Claudia Huaiquimilla and Pablo Greene called me for “Mala Junta” and they gave me the script and the truth is that it caught my attention, I found it very interesting. “It addressed social issues that are very important in this country,” he maintains.
“I have been lucky enough to be able to choose my works and I think I have been on the right path of choosing things, projects where they generate these instances of debate and critical thinking about the country we live in,” he reflects.
Audiovisual industry in Chile
The actor has witnessed the passing of the years in the Chilean audiovisual industry, when asked about its evolution in recent years he believes that he does not know if it has “changed so much, there is a very unequal gap.”
“There is a social class that continues to hoard audiovisual funds. We have the big production companies, who have me a little banned from talking about this, we know where they come from and I find that there is selfishness there, because if you have the means, if you work in advertising, if you have millions, that is, leave a little for new producers, for goats young people who have interesting projects where they address important social issues and not so much feed your ego but rather allow others to also have the opportunity to generate space and make a name for themselves in the audiovisual field,” he says.
In that sense, he points out that culture plays a fundamental role in society, “I believe that an uncultured country is easier to dominate, to be able to take it where capitalism wants, to be a consumer society, where they do not have their own ideas.” , where they have no criticism of how they live, how they are governed. And of course, always what serves to emancipate people, where they have their critical opinion, their growth in spiritual consciousness, distances them from this system that is consumer. So therefore it is not useful for them to have thinking people, but on the contrary, that is perhaps why they do not inject as much into the culture, because culture is a very important thing.”
Movie Theater Network Month
Nearly 50 national and international titles, of different genres and formats, will give life to the celebration of the Cinema Network Month, organized by the Guild Association of Independent Cinemas of Chile.
The event is held with the purpose of celebrating cinema in its different manifestations and, at the same time, surveying attendance at local exhibition halls, promoting the social and cultural importance of these spaces throughout the country.
From June 1 to 30, the event will offer exhibitions in the 16 rooms from Arica to Coyhaique that make up the Network, to which five other collaborating rooms have been added that are currently in the process of joining the association. Among the programming milestones, two classics stand out that this year celebrate two decades since their premiere in 2004: the Chilean It hurtsdirected by Andrés Wood, and the Uruguayan feature film Whisky, directed by Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll.
Ariel Mateluna will be participating in the “Machuca” film forum in the following movie theaters:
- CasaVerde (Los Andes) Friday June 28 – 7:00 p.m.
- San Antonio Cultural Center (San Antonio) Tuesday, June 25 – 7 pm.
- Room K (Maipú) Saturday June 22 – 4:00 p.m.
- National Cinematheque of Chile (Santiago) Wednesday, June 26 – 7:00 p.m. (Andrés Wood will be there)
- EXT UCM (Talca) Tuesday June 18 – 7:00 p.m.
- -1 CINEMA (Puerto Varas) Wednesday, June 19 – 9:00 p.m.
- Mafalda Mora Room – Diego Rivera Art House (Puerto Montt) Thursday, June 27 – 7:00 p.m.
- Coyhaique Cultural Center (Coyhaique) Wednesday, June 5 – 7:00 p.m.
- Nemesio Room Wednesday June 19 – 7:00 p.m. (Andrés Wood will be there)