Under the title “Chile por dentro y desde fuera” (“Chile Inside from Outside”), the San Sebastian Film Festival dedicated an entire section to Chilean cinema in its thirty-fifth edition in 1987. That September drew a tense line between past and present: Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’état and the cinematic re-examination of history, projecting a return to a still-uncertain democracy.

85 years had passed since the first film was made in Chile and, therefore, since the birth of cinema in the Andean country. That anniversary had provided the impetus for the organisation of the series at the San Sebastian Festival. But another event lied behind in that section’s programming: the twentieth anniversary of the First Meeting of Latin American Filmmakers, which had taken place in Viña del Mar in 1967 and had become a founding milestone for a cinema committed to political and social themes in Chile and throughout Latin America.

Diego Galán, director of the San Sebastian Film Festival since the previous edition, emphasised his intention to revive a certain fascination with surprise in the series dedicated to Chilean cinema, as well as in the rest of the sections. The event had regained its status as a non-specialised competitive festival (categorised by FIAPF) and sought to reaffirm that fact through the strength of its programming. Journalist and board member José María Riba was appointed to coordinate the Chile section.

The series consisted of thirty-six films. Renowned director Patricio Guzmán participated with his documentary En nombre de Dios (1987) and was present at the press conference, while Ignacio Agüero exhibited his short films No olvidar (1982) and Como me da la gana (1985). Likewise, Orlando Lubbert, who would later win the Golden Shell with the film A Cab for Three (2001), entered into the spotlight with the works El Paso (1979) and Chile, la cultura necesaria (1986). The only film in the section directed by a female filmmaker was Yo no le tengo miedo a nada by Tatiana Gaviola (1984). Sergio Bravo, founder of the Chilean Experimental Film Centre, played a leading role in the series. His short films Día de organillos (1959) and Ese desconocido (1960), his feature film No eran nadie (1981), and the only fiction film in Chilean silent cinema, The Hussar of Death by Pedro Sienna (1925), which Bravo had recovered and restored in 1961, were screened. Lastly, filmmaker Hernán Castro, a member of the Cine-Ojo Collective, presented Vitel Noticias Número 9, an alternative video newscast that was completed just a few days before the festival began.

“We, with our media, try to counteract this entire state apparatus, but we are the David versus the Goliath of communications”, Castro said at the discussion held about the section. The roundtable discussion exposed disagreements among the filmmakers regarding the production of testimony or independent fiction, but it also highlighted a shared common thread: the work of dissemination that emerged from the cinematographic activity carried out while in exile. As film historian Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, moderator of that panel, pointed out in one of the issues of the Festival’s diary, the 176 films that Chilean filmmakers shot outside their country since the beginning of the military dictatorship represented a unique case of continuity of local cinema in the diaspora.

Inside. From outside. The title of the series summarised a special period for Chile, its cinema, and its people. The poster held in the Festival archives depicted a common point of view. The margins are red, the background is black. And, in the centre of the name and the image, the clarity of a person advancing forward with his fist raised.