Chilean documentary film director Ignacio Aguero will be holding a retrospective exhibition at the 25th Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Airport. This film festival will be held on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria from April 23rd to May 3rd.
This tribute will celebrate the life and career of the groundbreaking and award-winning documentarian, known for films such as “Cien niños esperando un tren” (100 Children Waiting for the Train) (1988), “El otro día” (The Other Day), and “Como me da la gana II” (This Is What I Like II), which won the Grand Prix at the Marseille FID. In 2016, Nunca subí el Provincia (Nunca subí el Provincia) won the same award in 2019, and also won the Best Latin American Film Award at the Mar del Plata Film Festival.
The Las Palmas retrospective will screen seven of Aguero’s films, focusing on a filmography that, according to the festival’s programmers, occupies a “central place in contemporary Latin American cinema” and that “rewrote the tradition of Chilean political documentaries about the dictatorship by shifting the focus from direct political activity to reflection on memory and its mechanisms.”
Aguero’s latest feature, “Cultas a mis padres muertos” (Letter to my dead parents), premiered in 2025 and was screened at film festivals including the International Film Festival. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival (IDFA), De Crisbois International Airport Film Festival, FID Marseille, and Yamagata International Airport Documentary Film Festival.
Born in Santiago in 1952, Aguero studied architecture before turning to film studies, graduating shortly after Chile’s popular socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. This event dashed the hopes of Aguero and millions of Chileans. “There was a time when it was very promising and full of bright futures, and then suddenly everything came crashing down,” Aguero told Variety from his home in Santiago. “It became a violent society, a society of extreme violence from the state.” The strict rule of law under Pinochet also hindered the young director’s cinematic ambitions. “There was no possibility of making a movie.”
While most filmmakers fled Chile during the Pinochet era, Aguero remained in Chile, partially spurred by what he described as “the need to be aware of what was going on” under the military regime. His first film, “No olvidar” (Don’t forget), which the director shot in secret, chronicles the kidnapping and murder of a father and his four sons, whose bodies were finally discovered after a five-year search. In the short documentary, Aguero follows the widow’s weekly walk to the spot where his body was found, an impressive ritual that the director says “somehow represents what Chile was like at that time.”
The director’s next film marked a breakthrough in his career. By the 1980s, Aguero was one of many filmmakers working in Chile’s growing advertising industry, struggling to find his own cinematic expression while struggling with the practical constraints of filmmaking under Pinochet’s dictatorship. His response was “Como me da la gana” (This is the way I like it), in which the 30-something director interviews some of the more famous filmmakers about why they continue to make films.
“No Orvidal” (Remember)
Courtesy of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Airport. film festival
It was a formative experience for Aguero. “There were no producers. There was nothing. There was no industry. There was no money at all,” he says, adding that his situation reflected the reality faced by other Chilean filmmakers at the time. “We wanted to make movies and we wanted to do anything to make movies, but it was very difficult to make it happen. So we made our own money. We were our own producers.” Despite the difficulties of making movies under Pinochet, “we were free to work on our own,” he added.
Aguero’s career in advertising would ultimately help end Pinochet’s rule. That was when he co-directed a series of short television shows for Chile’s opposition parties before the 1988 referendum ousted the powerful. The event was memorably depicted by Pablo Larrain in the Oscar-nominated historical drama “No.” With the return of democracy to Chile, filmmakers no longer have to fear the looming dictator and his deadly secret police. “I was able to shoot without fear,” Aguero said. “That was the most important thing. We weren’t afraid to work.”
Few of the director’s films since Pinochet have been overtly political. Instead, they often unfold as a series of conversations. Not only between the director and the people he meets, but also with the spaces they inhabit, interrogating our relationships with our homes and communities and observing how physical spaces preserve memories and mark the passage of time.
In “Aquí se construye. O ya no existe el lugar en donde nací” (Under construction, or the place where I was born no longer exists) (2000), it takes the form of a conversation with a neighbor whose house has been demolished. In Nunca subí el Provincia (2019), the director examines how new buildings have changed neighborhood life, while at the same time obstructing former views of the Provincia hills and Andes.
“Filmmaking is a way of interacting with and knowing the world, and that’s where my cinematic aesthetic comes from,” says Aguero. “Movies don’t want to say anything. Like many documentaries, they are made not to say anything. My documentaries are far from that. They don’t want to say anything. They just want to create situations that approximate reality and put aspects of reality on screen.”
As he himself admits, this approach comes with risks. “There is never a guarantee of success,” he says. “Maybe I’m always on the verge of failure.”
“Cultas a mis padres muertos” (Letter to dead parents)
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Airport Film Festival
Aguero’s latest film, “Cartas a miss Padres muertos” (Letter to Dead Parents), combines many of the personal and political themes that have concerned the director over half a century of filmmaking. Conceived on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Pinochet’s coup, the film incorporates home movies, family photographs, interviews with people who knew Aguero’s father, and footage of the coup and life under Pinochet’s dictatorship. Adopting an epistolary format that gave him “complete freedom” to celebrate the anniversary as he saw fit, Aguero reflects on what his father thought about the recent course of Chile’s history, both for his country and for his family.
Now in his 70s and preparing the latest in a series of career-spanning retrospectives, Aguero is reluctant to consider the fate of documentary film in these troubled times. Does the rise of right-wing demagogues bear chilling similarities to the Pinochet era? Could documentary filmmaking be an important bulwark against growing attacks on truth and fundamental freedoms? Aguero is cautious, but remains a firm believer in the unglamorous task of setting up a camera and watching the world pass through its frame.
“There is no certainty in anything. There is doubt everywhere. There are no leaders and there is no truth,” he says. “It allows you to approximate the world in a very personal way, in a way. It forces you to confront the world in a personal way. And I think that’s a good thing for documentary filmmakers.”
