NERUDA

Chile, 1948: President Gabriel González Videla, elected with the votes of the Communists, bans their party and has its members arrested. The senator and poet Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) publicly condemns this and has to go into hiding; with his wife Delia del Carril (Mercedes Morán) he moves between hideouts, leaving books of poetry behind as messages to the resistance. The policeman Óscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal) is set on his trail, studying the poet in order to understand him – and yet always remaining one step behind. “Neruda” (2016) by the Chilean Pablo Larraín tells this chase all the way into the snow-covered Andes.

Pablo Larraín calls the film an anti-biopic: not a portrait of a life but a game played with the poet’s cosmos, in which the pursuer must grasp that he is only a minor character in Neruda’s story. Larraín mixes noir, road movie and black comedy, cuts dialogue across locations, and makes space part of the psychology. It premiered in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in Cannes in 2016; the film was Chile’s Oscar submission and was nominated for a Golden Globe. It was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2016.

Shown at the 2016 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2016 · Film Archive