Chilean documentary filmmaker Ignacio Agüero will be honored with a retrospective at the 25th Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Intl. Film Festival, which takes place April 23-May 3 on Spain’s Gran Canaria island.
The tribute will celebrate the life and career of the groundbreaking and award-winning documentarian, known for films including “Cien niños esperando un tren” (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train) (1988), “El otro día” (The Other Day), “Como me da la gana II” (This Is the Way I Like It II), which won the Grand Prix at FIDMarseille in 2016, and “Nunca subí el Provincia” (I Never Climbed the Provincia), which won the same prize in 2019, as well as the award for best Latin American film at the Mar del Plata Festival.
The Las Palmas retrospective will include screenings of seven of Agüero’s films, highlighting a filmography that occupies “a central place in Latin American modern cinema” and “rewrites the tradition of Chilean political documentaries about the dictatorship by shifting the focus from direct political activism to a reflection on memory and its mechanisms,” according to the festival’s programmers.
Agüero’s latest feature, “Cartas a mis padres muertos” (Letters to My Dead Parents), which premiered in 2025, screened at festivals including the Intl. Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the Doclisboa Intl. Film Festival, FIDMarseille and the Yamagata Intl. Documentary Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize.
Born in Santiago in 1952, Agüero studied architecture before turning to film studies, graduating soon after Chile’s popular socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. The events crushed the hopes of Agüero and millions of Chileans. “From a period that was very promising, a sunny future…suddenly everything broke down,” Agüero tells Variety from his home in Santiago. “It became a society of violence — of extreme violence coming from the state.” The draconian rule of law under Pinochet also thwarted the young director’s cinematic ambitions. “There was no possibility to make films.”
While most filmmakers fled Chile during the Pinochet years, Agüero stayed behind, spurred in part by what he describes as the “need to be aware of what was going on” under the military regime. His first film, “No olvidar” (Don’t Forget), which the director filmed covertly, chronicles the kidnapping and murder of a father and his four sons whose bodies were only found after a five-year search. In the documentary short, Agüero follows the man’s widow on her weekly walk to where the bodies were discovered, a striking ritual that the director says “somehow described what Chile was at that moment.”
The director’s next film signaled a breakthrough in his career. By the 1980s, Agüero was among the many filmmakers working in Chile’s growing advertising industry, struggling with the practical constraints of moviemaking under the Pinochet dictatorship while also trying to find his cinematic voice. His response was “Como me da la gana” (This Is the Way I Like It), in which the thirtysomething director interviews a series of more established filmmakers about why they continue to make movies.
“No olvidar” (Don’t Forget)
Courtesy of Courtesy of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Intl. Film Festival
It was a formative experience for Agüero. “I had no producers. Nothing. No industry. No money at all,” he says, adding that his situation mirrored the reality facing other Chilean filmmakers at the time. “We wanted to make films, and we would do anything to make films, but it was very difficult to do it. So we made our own money. We were our own producers.” Despite the difficulties of making movies under Pinochet, he adds, “we were creating our own freedom to work.”
Agüero’s advertising background would eventually prove instrumental in ending Pinochet’s rule, when he co-directed a series of short TV programs for Chile’s opposition parties ahead of the 1988 referendum that ousted the strongman — events memorably portrayed by Pablo Larraín in his Oscar-nominated historical drama “No.” With the return of democracy to Chile, filmmakers no longer had the specter of the dictator and his dreaded secret police looming over them. “We could shoot without fear,” says Agüero. “That was the principal thing — we had no fear to work.”
Few of the director’s films post-Pinochet are overtly political. Instead, they often unfold as a series of conversations — not only between the director and the people he encounters, but with the spaces they inhabit, interrogating our relationships to our homes and our communities, and observing how physical spaces both preserve memory and mark the passage of time.
In “Aquí se construye. O ya no existe el lugar en donde nací” (Under Construction, or the Place Where I Was Born No Longer Exists) (2000), that takes the form of conversations with a neighbor who lives through the demolition of the house next door. In “Nunca subí el Provincia” (I Never Climbed the Provincia) (2019), the director examines how a new building has changed the life of his neighborhood, while also blocking the view he once had of the Provincia hill and the Andes mountain range.
“Filmmaking is a way to contact the world and to know the world. And that has a derivation in something aesthetic about my films,” Agüero says. “The films don’t want to say something. The films are made not to say things, as many documentaries do. My documentaries are far away from that. They do not want to say anything. They just want to create the situation to approximate reality and let aspects of reality come into the screen.”
It’s an approach that, by his own admission, doesn’t come without risk. “I never have a guarantee of success,” he says. “Maybe I’m always on the edge of failing.”
“Cartas a mis padres muertos” (Letters to My Dead Parents)
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Intl. Film Festival
Agüero’s latest film, “Cartas a mis padres muertos” (Letters to My Dead Parents), combines many of the personal and political themes that have engaged the director throughout a half-century of filmmaking. Conceived on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup, it weaves together home movies, family photographs and interviews with people who knew Agüero’s father, along with footage of the coup and life under the Pinochet dictatorship. Employing an epistolary form that gave him “total freedom” to engage the anniversary as he saw fit, Agüero reflects on what his father would have thought about the course of recent Chilean history, both for his country and his family.
Now in his seventies, readying for the latest in a series of career-spanning retrospectives, Agüero is reluctant to weigh in on the fate of documentary cinema in these fraught times. Does the rise of right-wing demagogues offer chilling parallels to the Pinochet era? Is documentary filmmaking a vital bulwark against mounting assaults on truth and basic freedoms? Agüero is circumspect, though he still steadfastly believes in the humble task of setting up a camera and watching the world pass through its frame.
“There’s no certainty of anything. There is doubt everywhere. You have no leaders. No truths,” he says. “That in some way allows you to approximate the world in a very personal way. You are forced to confront the world in a personal way. And I think that’s something good for documentary filmmakers.”
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