Sanfic Honors Pablo Larrain Regular Alfredo Castro with Career Achievement Award
variety.comAnna Marie de la Fuente The 18th Santiago Int’l Film Festival (Sanfic) is paying tribute to Chile’s most internationally renowned and arguably hardest working actor, the peripatetic Alfredo Castro who will attend Sanfic’s inauguration Aug.
14 to receive his lifetime achievement award and kick off a retrospective of his films.Also a playwright and theater director, Castro has worked across Europe and Latin America, acting in French, Spanish, Portuguese and a number of accents and dialects from Latin America, including neutral Spanish. “I haven’t worked in English but I certainly hope to one day,” he says.
Meanwhile, he has won a boatload of awards from festivals and award events across the world. Yet, he would also be high up the order of figures who have helped shape Chile’s post-Pinochet film, theater and now TV scene into one of the most vibrant, surprising and constantly questioning of any country in Latin America.Castro, 66, estimates that he has been working on an average of five to six films a year, and thanks the number of co-productions and streaming platforms that have brought him so much work. “I think the pandemic also saw a lot of projects suspended and they’ve now been reactivated,” he adds.He’s now on the set of Pablo Larrain’s dark comedy for Netflix, “El Conde,” where he plays the assistant, a Chilean Igor if you will, to the character of dictator Augusto Pinochet as a world-weary 250-year-old vampire.“El Conde” is Castro’s seventh film with Larrain, a storied collaboration that began with “Fuga” in 2006 to “Tony Manero” where he played a demented imitator of John Travolta’s “Saturday Night Fever” character, followed by “Post Mortem,” “No,” “El Club” and “Neruda.”Asked if they’ve developed a shorthand.
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