Mónica Echeverría

During Chilean dictatorship an exceptional group of women emerges and they will leave a unique legacy in history. It's the "Women for Life" movement. Female figures almost forgotten that in times of military dictatorship, when few dared to go out into the street, they organized by calling thousands of women who courageously manage to make art actions and lightning and unprecedented acts for the time.

During 1648, a dreaded commissioner of the Holy Inquisition arrives at Santiago. Social, political and religious life is shaken when six respected and married women are accused of committing the sin of fornication.

October 5, 1974: In the suburbs of Santiago, pregnant Carmen is badly injured and her partner Miguel, head of the resistance against Pinochet's dictatorship, is killed in combat. So begins a journey into the memories of the defeated...

In a bar in Santiago, two old men talk over their past. This is a strange discussion. In fact, they talk of themselves as if they were dead. We don't know what is true or false, what is dream or reality.

An aged former sailor, ill and confined in his bed, maintains his firm grip on his house and his son, who is having an affair with the widowed next door, through many mirrors displayed in his room and all around the house.

Erre, a teenager that lives with his uncle, his aunt and an almost absent sister, is erased from the roster on his school. From then on, he just wanders in places where the strange is barely hidden under an imitation of the ordinary.

A young working class girl falls in love with an upper class boy who is part of the plot to assassinate General Schneider, head of the Chilean Army.

Mordant, self-aware, freighted with sensitivity toward Chile’s problem, wary of caricature, disposed toward consciousness of human fallibility, it is a deft blend of fiction and documentary set in the tumultuous days leading up to the election of Salvador Allende in 1970.

A foreign journalist arrives on a small Pacific island 200 miles off the coast of South America. Once a leper colony, the island was later transformed into a prison and then, under U.N. mandate, made into an independent republic. Yet despite democratic structures, the inhabitants--who speak a strange dialect composed of Spanish and English--still obey the old prison rules. After sending back detailed accounts of the torture and repression seen everywhere, the journalist realizes that she"s fallen into the trap created for her by the islanders: lacking natural resources, the island"s main export is news. The clearest anticipation of Ruiz"s later European work, The Penal Colony is a powerful document of the tensions and contradictions in Chile in the months before Allende"s electoral victory.