Speaker: Ignacio Agüero, Filmmaker
Moderated by: Haden Guest, Director, Harvard film Archive
Director in Person
$15 Special Event Tickets
Directed by Ignacio Agüero
Chile/UK, 1988, DCP, color and b&w, 55 min
Spanish with English subtitles
DCP source: Filmmaker
Agüero’s remarkable documentary begins as a tender portrait of influential film historian, educator and activist Alicia Vega (b.1931) teaching a workshop on early film history to impoverished youth living on the outskirts of Santiago. Gradually the film transforms into a devastating critique of the Pinochet regime by shifting focus to Vega’s young students and their families, whose cramped quarters Agüero visits in touching scenes that reveal his compassionate understanding of a home as poignant expression of its denizen’s aspirations and vulnerabilities. Censors struggled to explain why they absurdly restricted the film to viewers over the age of twenty-one. For to do so would have been to recognize precisely what Agüero’s film and Vega’s workshop clearly, courageously expose: the deliberate stratification of class through poverty and lack of education cruelly imposed by the dictatorship. Yet with One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, Agüero also offers cinema—both his own and the “films” and “cameras” made of paper and glue by the children—as a means to attain the knowledge and perspective that can lead to a freedom otherwise unavailable.
This screening is part of Chile Año Cero / Chile Year Zero
Special thanks: Haden Guest, Director, Harvard Film Archive
Presented in collaboration with Harvard Film Archive
LOCATION:Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20230922T230000Z DTEND:20230922T230000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR