Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain
| Photo Credit: S.R. Praveen
Pablo Larrain flips through the photographs that he clicked on his phone, of the local body election campaign posters in the streets of Thiruvananthapuram. He enquires about the results of the elections and promptly shares his own worries about the projected results of the national elections back home in Chile. “I just wish that if the extreme right wing wins as the polls say, I wish them to understand that they will govern the entire country, not just the ones who voted for them,” the Chilean filmmaker says in the middle of an interview to The Hindu on Sunday evening.
Considered one of the masters of contemporary world cinema, Larrain is at the 30th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) as the chief guest. It is not surprising that politics would pop up in his conversations, for his cinema has always been political, with quite a few of his works dealing with themes set around Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year long dictatorship in Chile, be it his early films such as Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010) or No (2012) or the recent El Conde (2023), a horror comedy which had Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher as vampires.
“My films are not concerned specifically about the Pinochet regime, but about how it reorganised our society and not only what happened back then, but what happened afterwards. I think this kind of change creates consequences that might be invisible at the beginning, but over time they become visible. I was born in 1976 and I was still a young boy when Pinochet lost the referendum in 1988. But my life as an adult has always been about the political, social and cultural consequences of the dictatorship. It is about how it changed our minds. I think that authoritarianism and fascism can be understood in many countries and many cultures. So, I don’t have any idea about how people watching the movie El Conde here would react to the metaphors in it,” says Larrain.
Larrain’s oeuvre is also marked by the several biopics he made, including Jackie (with Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy), Spencer (with Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana) and Maria (with Angelina Jolie as opera singer Maria Callas). But Larrain’s films do not follow the expected beats of traditional biopics, which often fixate on the chronology and major events.
Observing the individual
“I think that the tendency of observing someone through many years is not necessarily the right approach. If someone would observe me in very strong detail and at a very intimate level for five days, they would know how I do things in private, who I talk to, how close I am with my child or family or what my ideas are. If a person is observed through a period of time and if that observation is very intimate, especially if during those days of observation a big crisis comes in, whether it is the death of your husband, end of your marriage or the end of your life (in these three movies), or in the case of Neruda (someone escaping the law), I think you can find substantial definitions of that person, always in the scope of fiction. That is what I do,” he says.
Larrain recollects that his path to cinema began from a little film projector in his room. “I was very lucky because I was able to buy a little film projector. Back then at the Goethe-Institut in Santiago, in the 1990s, you could rent film prints. I would walk out with four or five very heavy bags inside a case and then would project in my small room. I was fascinated not only with the film, but the beauty of the projection process too. It became first a technical thing, then a narrative thing and later, my work,” he says.
He appears very impressed by the housefull cinema halls at the IFFK for independent cinema, so much so that he would like to come back and learn more about the place. “Now, co-productions are happening. Maybe, we could see people from here shooting in Chile. I would like to come and make a movie here,” he says.
Published – December 14, 2025 09:14 pm IST
