Film Program #2: U.S. Premiere of Notes for a Film (Ignacio Agüero, 2022) + Film Quarterly Fall Issue Launch

Co-presented with Film Quarterly
With Ignacio Agüero and Film Quarterly Editor-at-large B. Ruby Rich in attendance

This free event takes place on Wednesday, September 20, 2023 at 6:30pm at Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center’s Howard Gilman Theater. Registration is required to guarantee a ticket. Please RSVP here.

Please join us at 5:00pm for a pre-screening reception at Café Paradiso and meet filmmaker Ignacio Agüero and the Film Quarterly team!

In Notas para una película, acclaimed Chilean documentary director Ignacio Agüero retains the essayistic dimensions typical of his latest works. But this time he moves away from the domestic sphere of his own house and neighborhood captured in films like El otro día (2012) and Nunca subí el Provincia (2019) and redirects his gaze towards a story of land dispossession and colonization. The film is loosely based on the diaries of Belgian engineer Gustave Viernory, who traveled to the south of Chile in the late 19th century to build the first railroad that cut through Indigenous Mapuche land. The book is merely a starting point, though, and Agüero turns this eyewitness account into a marvelous and unclassifiable film that mixes the essay, the memoir, archival footage, testimony, reenactments, and an oblique documentary approach that extends into the political present of the long-standing conflict between the Chilean state and the Mapuche people.

This is the second in a series of six film programs titled “Archives for the Future.” This free screening at Film at Lincoln Center also celebrates the launch of the Fall 2023 issue of Film Quarterly and its Special Focus: Chilean Film & Media Fifty Years Later.

Organized by José Miguel Palacios, Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto, and Film Quarterly Editor-in-chief Rebecca Prime.

Major funding for Film Quarterly is provided by the JustFilms Initiative of the Ford Foundation.

September 20, 2023
Reception at Café Paradiso @ 5pm
Screening at Howard Gilman Theater (Film at Lincoln Center) @ 6:30 pm
Followed by Q&A with Ignacio Agüero, B. Ruby Rich, José Miguel Palacios, and Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto.