- From October 12 to 18, FICValdivia will offer a retrospective of the work of three prominent contemporary filmmakers, who will visit Valdivia to present their motion pictures and take part in open activities throughout the festival.
The 33rd edition of the Valdivia International Film Festival once again reaffirms its commitment to discovering, reflecting on, and promoting auteur cinema through Filmmakers in the Spotlight. Each year, it is one of the sections that congregates audiences to delve into the careers of directors whose work has expanded the possibilities of contemporary cinematic language. More than a retrospective, this series offers a journey through creative universes that engage in dialogue with different ways of understanding cinema, its history, and its constant transformations.
About it, Raúl Camargo, Director of the Valdivia International Film Festival, said: “In this edition, the selection brings together three authors from different generations and backgrounds whose filmographies share a constant formal exploration and a unique perspective on time, place, and image. From contemplating the landscape and experimenting with narrative to researching the material aspects of cinema, their works offer an opportunity to examine projects that have shaped international cinematic language and continue to push its boundaries.”
Filmmakers in the Spotlight will feature Argentinean director Lisandro Alonso, a key figure in the New Argentine Cinema; Ecuadorian auteur Daniela Delgado Viteri, whose work moves between film essay, memory, and documentary observation; and Franco-Peruvian creator Rose Lowder, a leading figure in experimental celluloid cinema. Through a selection of full-lengths and short films, the festival invites audiences to discover the aesthetic pursuits, creative processes, and main inquiries that run through the work of these three moving-image artists.
Lisandro Alonso and Circular Stories
La Libertad Doble (2026), the new picture by the Argentine director Lisandro Alonso (Buenos Aires, 1973), provides the perfect opportunity for FICValdivia to dedicate a showcase to part of the work of one of the directors who defined the aesthetics and concerns of the New Argentine Cinema and, to a large extent, the narrative rhythm known as slow cinema.
Having made its world premiere at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, this project acts as a sequel to La Libertad. Marking the 25th anniversary of that seminal first feature, the film returns to the circular motif originally established in that 2001 work. La Libertad gives us Misael, a solitary man anchored to the routines of nature and whose life is inextricably attuned to what the rural landscape offers him: trees to cut and carve, and wild animals on which to survive.
With no greater context than the symbiotic relationship between character and nature, Lisandro Alonso’s debut was built on long takes, a static camera, and remarkably sparse dialogue. This approach allowed the very dynamics of time to dictate the film’s mise-en-scène, completing a 24-hour life cycle that could easily repeat itself eternally within the vastness of the pampa.
The way La Libertad Doble returns to this cinematic framework is particularly revealing. Despite the twenty-five years between films, Misael’s routine and vital signs remain incorruptibly the same, as if the best expression of this permanence is a temporal dimension that appears completely frozen. However, what disrupts the continuity here is the appearance of a second character. Micaela, the protagonist’s sister, has just been discharged from a psychiatric institution, and the fragility of her condition forces Misael to adopt a different way of being in the world. It is not merely a confrontation between two emotional states that is at stake in La Libertad Doble, but distinct ways of conceptualizing time, pacing, and above all, relating to an ever-more remote notion of the social sphere.
The complementary dialogue between both films maps out the creative itinerary that Lisandro Alonso has traced across Misael’s pampa. This trajectory pivots on the short Sin Título (Carta para Serra) (2011), in which the director returns to his beloved character’s territory. Here, the reunion transforms into a reflection that responds to Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra — a cinematic dialogue originally initiated in El Señor Hizo en Mí Maravillas (2011), a film that itself engaged with the settings of Don Quixote staged by the Spanish auteur in Honor de Cavallería. This foray into epistolary cinema — a variant within the forms of essay cinema — focuses not on Misael, but on the writer Fabián Casas, whose urban sensibility and contemporary temperament openly disrupt the pacing and tempo of Alonso’s cinema.
His retrospective is rounded out with the feature films Los Muertos (2004) and Jauja (2014). The former extends the stylistic elements defined in La Libertad and transfers them to the province of Corrientes, centering on Vargas, a fifty-something ex-con who, upon leaving prison, only wants to reunite with his daughter, whom he hasn’t seen since she was a child. To do this, he undertakes a long journey across the humid, tropical borderlands of northeastern Argentina. Despite being a kind of road movie, his sophomore project is also a work about immobility. Vargas has spent a good part of his adult life in prison, which instills in him a kind of existential dread, a feeling the picture transforms into the inertia of displacement. Once again, the narrative gives way to physical description — first detailing the bureaucratic protocols of his release, and later the minutiae of the journey. In doing so, it underscores the misalignment between the character’s uprooting and his entry into a territory that, as in La Libertad, gradually drives him toward a state of primitivism.
After Fantasma (2006), a self-reflexive piece that stages an encounter between the characters of his previous features in a cinema on Corrientes Street, and Liverpool (2008), a drama about a merchant seaman who docks in Ushuaia to visit his mother, Alonso embarked on shooting Jauja, his most ambitious project to date, and which marks his return to the pampa as an existential backdrop. His fifth full-length is set within the context of the so-called Conquest of the Desert — namely, the policy of expansion and territorial annexation carried out in southern Argentina during the final quarter of the 19th century. The title examines the criminal and genocidal actions through the eyes of Dinesen, a Danish captain who has arrived in the region with Ingeborg, his 15-year-old daughter, to work as an engineer in the Argentinean army. As in Los Muertos and Liverpool, the journey will become metaphysical, one which Alonso will take to its ultimate narrative consequences.
The Spotlight on Lisandro Alonso will be presented by the filmmaker himself, along with Misael Saavedra and Chilean actress Catalina Saavedra, co-star of La Libertad Doble.
Spotlight on Lisandro Alonso
- La Libertad. Argentina, 2001. 63 minutes.
- Los Muertos. Argentina, France, Netherlands, 2004. 78 minutes.
- Sin Título (Carta para Serra). Argentina, 2011. 23 minutes.
- Jauja. Argentina, Denmark, France, 2014. 108 minutes.
- La Libertad Doble. Chile, Argentina, Luxembourg, Germany, United Kingdom, 2026. 100 minutes.
Daniela Delgado Viteri: The Record as Communication
Born in Ecuador and trained in Argentina, France, and Spain — where she currently resides — the cinematic approach developed by Daniela Delgado Viteri (Portoviejo, 1987) is best understood as a system that also encompasses festival programming and film criticism. Specifically, her audiovisual work is shaped by her experience as a foreigner in the various countries where she has lived. Consequently, her projects engage with different places and people, bordering on an anthropological and cultural reflection on Ecuadorian society. Often capturing her work in both film and digital formats, her titles are typically organized into chapters or scenes. Within these, she intertwines text and voiceover narration into a largely epistolary structure, bridging the visual with the literary.
The upcoming Filmmakers in the Spotlight program features six of her films, spanning selections from recent festival editions alongside her newest premieres.
The festival first encountered Delgado Viteri’s universe in Atajos (2019), a short divided into five segments, which the director presented in the Official Selection of Latin American Short Films at FICValdivia 26. It is an exploration of Ecuador’s recent history, tracking the country’s trajectory from the fleeting presidency of Abdalá Bucaram onward, based on a pair of voiceover accounts that weave seamlessly between social and political spheres. Screening in the same competition at FICValdivia 28, Antonio Valencia (2020) features slow-motion images of vacationers at the coastal town of San Jacinto, overlaid with subtitles of a speculative dialogue on how the sea affects speech delivery and patterns, while the faint audio of an Ecuadorian national team soccer match drifts in the background.
The short Todxs Queremos un Lugar al que Llamar Nuestro (2022) was part of the Tramas section at FICValdivia 30. In it, Daniela Delgado deepens her exploration of everyday characters and situations, this time, based on a series of voiceover narratives that touch on elements like the religious and the pagan. The film centers on the journey of a replica of the so-called Virgin of Quinche, a 16th-century carved effigy of deep devotion in Ecuador, which triggers unexpected fervor inside a Spanish salon where it is displayed as decoration. The piece is built around another instance of epistolary dialogue — structured through text messages and WhatsApp audio — unfolding across five scenes.
Alongside these selections, the spotlight also includes Video Epistolar 1 (2024), Pompa y Circunstancia (2026), and Tierras Luminosas (2026), her most recent projects. The first of these assembles a series of infrared recordings, where she essentially tracks wildlife. About halfway through the runtime, a voiceover cuts in to explain the intention to recreate the dynamics of security cameras at zoos and other spaces. These images, like her previous works, collectively form an intimate letter, this time exploring her relationship to cinema.
Pompa y Circunstancia combines distinct visual textures, beginning with still images of women of various ages loosely cropped and pasted onto a wall, followed by street footage captured at dusk when the low sun elongates silhouettes. In both cases, the voiceover meditates on the capacity of women to cast shadows, using this imagery to highlight an inherent sense of strength and dignity.
In Tierras Luminosas, by contrast, the director’s camera trains its lens on the remnants of urban life — trains, shacks, and trailers — presented as modern archaeology amid harsh natural landscapes that seem to have devoured them. The sense of desolation in these images soon shifts to the city and, simultaneously, to her relationships with men, which the spoken narrative constructs around the concept of speech and language appropriation.
Spotlight on Daniela Delgado Viteri
- Atajos. Ecuador, 2019. 18 minutes.
- Antonio Valencia. Ecuador, 2020. 6 minutes.
- Todxs Queremos un Lugar al que Llamar Nuestro. Ecuador, Spain, 2022. 13 minutes.
- Video Epistolar 1. Ecuador, 2024. 10 minutes.
- Pompa y Circunstancia. Ecuador, Spain, 2026. 11 minutes.
- Tierras Luminosas. Ecuador, 2026. 15 minutes.
Rose Lowder: Pushing the Medium
The third selection in Filmmakers in the Spotlight is the work of French-Peruvian artist Rose Lowder (Lima, 1941), who, after specializing in Fine Arts, began shifting from painting and sculpture toward the materiality of the film medium. In Avignon, where she settled in the early 1960s and befriended documentarian Jean Rouch, she made her defining turn toward cinema and the properties of non-commercial film formats — most notably 16mm. Using the camera as a privileged vehicle for perceiving what everyday life tends to obscure, Lowder made Rotación, Astucia y Álabes (1978). Her fifteen-minute debut film focuses entirely on the rotation of two paddle wheels on the Sorgue River in southeastern France. Her methodology enables her to deconstruct subjects into ever-smaller details, bordering on complete abstraction and periodically altering her material approach.
This film would define the stylistic direction, themes, and versatile formal techniques the director would go on to develop with each subsequent project. Geographically, her cinema is best defined as a micro-observation, establishing the territory surrounding her residence as a personal canvas for her inquiries. This freedom would also allow her to vary her capture methods, as seen in Calle de los Tintoreros (1979), which experiments with the properties of defocusing, or Algunas Observaciones (1979), which requires two projectors running simultaneously for screening. Over time, her work has led her to deeply investigate the characteristics and boundaries of the cinematic image — often straining the conventional nature of the format, reusing material, or even subjecting the film to multiple exposures within the same frame sequence.
The Rose Lowder spotlight features a series of programs tracing her nearly fifty-year trajectory, including a self-curated showcase reflecting her vision as an experimental cinema programmer — all screened on film at the Universidad Austral’s Sala Paraninfo.
Check out the program announcements to date for the 33rd FICValdivia, below:
Tributes to Chilean Cinema and Live Music Tributes
ABOUT FICVALDIVIA
Founded by Universidad Austral de Chile, produced by the Valdivia Cultural Center for Film Promotion, and convened by the Great City of Valdivia, the Los Ríos Regional Government, and Codeproval, the Valdivia International Film Festival is financed in part by the Audiovisual Fund of the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage, and the support of the Los Ríos Corfo Development Committee. FICValdivia offers audiovisual creators a space for dissemination and competition, along with promoting the domestic and international audiovisual production of artistic quality. A project under the Law of Cultural Donations. The festival will take place between October 12 and 18, 2026.
