Beneath the structure of the international film festivals, the potential of smaller ones is understated. Every filmmaker dreams of Cannes, Berlin, NYFF, London, TIFF, Venice and others. However, for young upcoming filmmakers, especially those in the peripheries of the globe, the journey is even harder to get their films programmed at those venues. An incredible example of the limitless potential of the regional festivals, those that embrace multiple countries or even a continent, is the Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia in Chile. The programming of the FICValdivia aims to discover prominent new voices of the Latin American cinema. Last year, the festival had two major debuts in its line-up. The first was La noche está marchándose ya (The Night is Fading Away) by the Argentie directors Ramiro Sonzini and Ezequiel Salinas. The second one is Matapanki by Diego Mapache Fuentes, a Chilean directorial debut that premiered at FICValdivia and internationally premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in the Generation 14plus section.
Through a punk rock approach, Matapanki follows a trio in the streets of a Chilean outskirt. Ricardo (Ramón Gálvez), Claudio (Antonia McCarthy), and Mella (Diego Bravo) are a trio of best friends who spend their day together listening to punk music, attending gigs in awful venues, and drinking cheap booze. At one of those concerts, Ricardo drinks from a mysterious bottle he finds in the bathroom, and suddenly, he gains superpowers. The life of Ricardo and his friends changes after he managed to provoke chaos in the country, and infuriated the President of the United States (Rodrigo Lisboa), who wants to control Chile and the Latin America. The film is a tale of a punky young punk Latin boy who is still unsure of his strength.
In his debut feature, Diego Mapache Fuentes demonstrates an ability to create ambiance and a different visual structure. Paying respect to the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, the filmmaker displays an utterly gritty visual in the film, emulating the Super 8mm footage of the past. Instead of a shallow imitation of an aesthetic, Fuentes aims for the overly polluted imagery, which favors the darker aspects of the black-and-white imagery, almost a fist fight between the light and the darkness of the film material. The result is a unique look, a reverence to the Punk Rock visuals from its inception in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, resonating the pains and requests of a working-class youth tired of the status quo. Similarly, Matapanki transposes those ideals. In the aftermath of the assassination, a journalist asks workers about their opinions on the event. The response is abrasive. Why does it matter? They are going to work early tomorrow. This political indifference is central to Fuentes punky rage, the screams of an uncertain generation unheard by the powerful.
The political content of the film is present in the action. Rather than a heavily politically charged script, the director sets the counterculture individuals against the colonizers. Yet, there is a lot of fun present in the dramaturgy and how those scenes look. As it is a small scope film, a college project, Fuentes works on a smaller scale, which really serves the universe of this peripheral superhero B-film. There are sequences in the mid-section of the film that do not work as well as the introduction or the conclusion. The director wants to justify the events to lead them to the ending. However, some scenes drag the film’s pacing, which functions better through its images than its dialogue. Still, there is a comedy present in the images and the lines that serve the naivety of the characters who want to fight the system, but are unsure where to begin. It is a tale of the youth, eager to change, uncertain how to do it, and afraid of suggesting alternatives to the current societal structures. But in this peripheral universe, the director collides the outskirts of Chile with the White House, a clever political commentary in a country that elected a far-right President.
Matapanki is a dirty-looking, low-budget, B-action film shot in the streets of the Chilean inner city. Diego Mapache Fuentes observes the will of the new generation to change the world politically, despite their uncertainties about the modus operandi to do so. Even if it suffers from dragging moments, it is another gem to world premiere at the FICValdivia, a new venue for the bright talents of Latin America.
Matapanki recently played at the Berlin Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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