Notas para una película

In the late 19th century, Belgian engineer Gustave Verniory arrives in the south of Chile to extend the railroad tracks. During this process, he has to deal with the conflict between the government and the Mapuche people, the owners of the land through which the train will pass. With his usual freedom of form, Agüero appropriates Verniory’s memories in order to explore the relationship between Chile’s present and its past. In his first approach to fiction, the filmmaker doesn’t avoid his documentarian side and tenses the idea of hybrid films, a label more and more frequent in discussions about contemporary cinema and with which he has been toying with since his first shorts—he once stated that the definition of genres deteriorates the freedom to create. The director finds, in this bond, present in cinema since its invention, an unquenchable source for stories.