Alvaro Riquelme S. / Chile / 14 minutes
Synopsis
"Adaptation of the play by Maria Belen Espinosa Peña, Butoh artist, and related to Jorge Peña Hen: Orchestra Director murdered by the Caravana de la Muerte during dictatorship in Chile."
This quite strange and hard-to-introduce short-film deals with the eponymous Chilean musician’s death in 1973. The soundtrack combines music, reading of letters, and experimentations— for example in one of the most striking scenes, the list of the prisoners’ names distorted in slowdown effect and mixed with an industrial percussive orchestration, which gradually turns into an unsettling quasi-rap.
To match this sound universe, the artist’s granddaughter (who also wrote and produced the film) makes up as a sort of personification of, if not exactly Hen, at least his history. Frozen dance, walk, acting, outline: there will be several uses of this incarnation.
Photography is very faded, espousing its topic, sometimes verging on black & white. The pretty pictures dive into different kinds of illustration, as exploration of certain eloquent places (return to jail) or literal simulation. We particularly like this palpable moment when, reconstructing the facts, fingers concretely draw Hen’s last sheet music with matches, as he wrote it in a cell.
Finally, Riquelme’s editing is very creative. Varying: sometimes contemplative superimposed images, sometimes accelerations or even flashes. That risky narration catches you from first to last minute and ends at the right time.
Conclusion
Somewhere between drama, theatre performance and documentary, Alvaro Riquelme S. multiplies good ideas and delivers a singular piece about one tragic and fascinating theme: the imminent disappearance of a great musician.
C.A.
« Jorge Peña Hen - The last hours of the Maestro » joins official selection for the Little Croco Festival’s first edition, nominated in the Musical category.
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