Aktion	Zweigstelle	Standorte	Status	Frist	Vorbestellungen
Vorbestellen	Zweigstelle: 05., Pannaschg. 6	Standorte: TT.KT.11 Mach	Status: Verfügbar	Frist:	Vorbestellungen: 0

Machuca is one of the finest and most affecting Latin American films of the 21st century, and a landmark of Chilean cinema. Set in Santiago in the months leading up to General Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état of September 1973, which overthrew Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government, the film tells the story of two twelve-year-old boys whose friendship becomes a microcosm of Chile's shattering political divisions. Director Andrés Wood, who attended the real school depicted in the film as a boy, brings an autobiographical tenderness and moral clarity to his material that gives even its most devastating moments a quality of lived truth.

 

At an elite Catholic school in Santiago, the idealistic Father McEnroe launches a social integration programme, admitting a group of children from the surrounding shantytowns alongside the school's privileged students. Gonzalo Infante, the son of a liberal bourgeois family, befriends Pedro Machuca, a poor boy from an indigenous background. Their friendship — shy, funny, tentative, and genuine — forms the emotional heart of the film, and is complicated by the presence of Silvana, Pedro's streetwise and spirited neighbor. Together the three children sell flags and cigarettes at demonstrations both left and right, their innocence brushing up against the violent ideology of the adults around them.

 

As the coup approaches and the political climate turns murderous, the fragile world the boys have built together is destroyed. Wood never reduces his characters to symbols: Gonzalo's complicity, his helplessness, and his grief are rendered with unsparing honesty. The film's final sequence — a military raid on the shantytown, the death of Silvana, Gonzalo's escape enabled solely by his skin colour and his school uniform — is among the most powerful conclusions in recent world cinema.