Un Certain Regard: “Calle Santa Fe” by Carmen Castillo

In the running for a Golden Camera award, Calle Santa Fe, programmed in the Un Certain Regard section, is Carmen Castillo’s first feature-length film. Castillo, a member of the
Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) in Chile, obtained political asylum in France in the 1970s after being deported. She wrote essays in French and directed television documentaries. Even when the
Pinochet dictatorship fell in 1990, Chile still seemed a hostile, foreign country to her. Starting in 2002, she began to try to tell her own personal story. On Santa Fe Street, on the outskirts
of Santiago, where her companion Miguel Enriquez, leader of the MIR and the resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship, was killed, Carmen Castillo survived. This is the starting point for
Calle Santa Fe, a journey to the places of the present. Castillo wonders: Is every act of resistance worth the pain? Did Miguel die for nothing?

“I think that we never understand how it can be possible to survive the loss of a great love, how to carry on in its absence,” Castillo confessed. “However, my memory of what
happened has gone from horror and evil to good. For a long time, I considered Chile to be full of nothing but fascists. Even though I knew that there was still humanity to be found among the
prisoners in the torture chambers and in the camps, I maintained this perception of evil and fear. (…) When I returned to Calle Santa Fe, it was like coming back to a place where a life had
been broken. But I finally understood this way of being, of fighting, of a people who’d never been considered, whose opinion regarding the dictatorship had always been ignored. (…) From a
film centered around a personal story, I move to a choral film, one that echoes the voices of a generation of revolutionaries.”

Photo Copyright Anne-Laure Bigot