Born in 1952, in Santiago, Chile. Agüero studied architecture and then went into film studies the year after the military coup, when all the filmmakers went into exile. He made his first film, One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, under the Pinochet dictatorship. During those years he worked in advertising, until he co-directed the Franja del No, a television program of the opposition parties to Pinochet that defeated him in the 1988 plebiscite. His line of work as an artist has been mainly documentary films. But he has also made telefilms, and has been an actor in numerous films, including several by Raúl Ruiz. Retrospectives of his films have been held in various countries, such as Mexico, Spain, Peru, Argentina (at BAFICI), Bolivia, New Zealand, and France. He has received numerous awards. For the last two films he received the Grand Prix at FIDMarseille in 2016 and 2019 and also best Latin American film at the Mar del Plata Festival in 2019.
Notes for a Film
Notes for a Film
Notes for a Film
Belgian engineer Gustave Verniory went to Chile in 1889 to build the railway through the Mapuche territory. Freely based on Verniory's diary, director Ignacio Agüero explores the act of filming and proposes a singular way of seeing this tumultuous past and the natural and human geography of his country.
'When Gustave Verniory arrives in Chile to work as an engineer on the railroad construction in the Araucania territory, in the south of the country, he gets off at a station—Angol Station—which no longer exists. He travels in the past and abroad the present. In between, everything he built at the end of the 19th century was destroyed as soon as Pinochet's dictatorship began. If this had been fiction, Verniory would have arrived, in the film, at a station reconstructed by set builders. But it is a documentary, so he arrives at a station in ruins.
'Based on the texts from the book Ten Years in Araucania, Verniory's diary, the film explores, through the character as well as through the actor portraying him, the railroad's penetration of the wilderness and the introduction of capitalism into Chile's indigenous territory. It does so with the economics of a documentary: period clothing for just one person, a single horse, and a film crew that simultaneously act as both crew members and extras.
'Thus, the film is able to explore history through the cinema's playful possibilities, becoming a fascinating experience for those making it as well as those watching.' - Ignacio AGÜERO
