Manuela Martelli’s Directors’ Fortnight Title ‘1976’ Gets Resonant Trailer (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentParis-based Luxbox has shared in exclusivity with Variety a first trailer for Manuela Martelli’s “1976,” one of Chile –and indeed Latin America’s – most anticipated feature debuts of the year which world premieres at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight.“1976” is produced by two of Chile’s most go-ahead outfits – Cinestación headed by director-producer Domingo Sotomayor (“Too Late to Die Young”) and Wood Productions, founded by Andrés Wood whose “Machuca” starred both Martelli and Aline Kuppenheim, the absolute protagonist of “1976.”The film is set, as its title implies, in 1976, one of the bloodiest years of Augusto Pinochet’s hugely bloody dictatorship.

It tells, as can be seen in the trailer. Kuppenheim plays Carmen, the wife of a Santiago de Chile doctor who heads off to her beach house to supervise its renovation during the holidays.

Carmen has all the accoutrements of a well-heeled middle-class wife and mother, sporting in the trailer a pearl necklace, cashmere coast and stylish shoes.

She also suffers the subjugation of her gender and conservative class, being treated as a wall-flower.“Mama’s becomes a literature teacher,” her daughter ironizes about Carmen’s reading short stories to blind villagers, as if Carmen’s having any kind of work is a joke.Yet, as Carmen is deciding whether sunset pick could be a good color for a wall, Pinochet is throwing chained Chileans into the ocean.Appealing to Carmen’s Christian conscience – “he’s like a starving Christ,” he says in the trailer – the local priest appeals to her to help cure a young man who’s escaped from jail.