Venice, September 1, 2023 – Chilean director Pablo Larrain returns to Venice to compete after Spencer in 2021 with a dark satire. El Condegraph in which Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochetglobal symbol of fascism, appears as 250 year old vampire. He, too, would be ready to die, but he has only one fear: he agrees to be called a murderer, but he cannot stand being called a thief. Wife (Gloria Munchmeyer), he then began a relationship with his dubious butler (Alfred Castro) is also a vampire. Finally, the sons and daughters are only waiting for his inheritance and thus are vampires rather than vampires. Film shot by the master of photography in black and white. Ed Lachman old colleague Wim Wenders, sees the 87-year-old legend of Chilean cinema Jaime Wadell as Pinochet.
The real Pinochet died in 2006 at the age of 91, rich and unpunished. During his regime, which began with bloody military coup in 1973. – the one in which it came assassinated President Salvador Allende – and continued until 1990, more than three thousand people died or “disappeared”, as in neighboring Argentina. A long history of violence in a country that previously had a long democratic history. Larraín has already touched on the subject of the Chilean regime and its dictator Pinochet in films such as Tony Manero and autopsyand in the film “No – Days of the Rainbow” about the referendum that led to the dictator’s resignation and the communication campaign that played a decisive role.
El Conde, Netflix productionwill have a limited theatrical release in the US and South America and will hit platforms worldwide on September 15th.
Larrain places Pinochet at the center of the screen for the first time, albeit in the form of a vampire. “I wanted to go straight up to him and take a close-up look at him,” says the director, who has his next project ready, a biopic about Maria Callas, who will see Angelina Jolie as an opera legend. It was necessary to find a way to do this: and then satire and the idea of \u200b\u200ba vampire came to my aid, depicting a monster whose subordinates killed thousands of dissidents, terrorized tens of thousands of people and literally sucked the hope out of an entire country. “When I thought about how to tell about this absolute evil,” says the director, “the idea of a vampire and eternal life arose spontaneously, thinking about his impunity: Pinochet, when he died, he was not convicted. We never took him to court. He died a millionaire and a free man, and his impunity is a wound to my whole country.”
The director concludes: “Santiago Mitre’s film Argentina 1985 came to mind, a film about justice. About how the whole country managed to progress, turn the page, because there was a collective condemnation of the dictatorship that lived on. and there was consensus that this should never happen again.”