Film Program #3: Ignacio Agüero’s This is the Way I Like It (1985) + One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (1988)

Co-presented with UnionDocs and Cinema Tropical

With director Ignacio Agüero in attendance

Get Tickets Here

The third program in the “Archives for the Future” film series is devoted to two early documentaries by celebrated documentary filmmaker Ignacio Agüero. In 1985, during the military dictatorship and after two years of massive protests against the regime, several Chilean directors were making documentary and fiction films. Agüero was one of them. He went out on the streets and to the locations and sets used by his fellow filmmakers, and asked them: Why are you making this film? Who is it for? With doses of humor and retaining hope in the face of palpable state violence, Como me da la gana (This is the Way I Like It) is a kaleidoscopic view on the powers of making films in times of political urgency.

Three years later, Agüero turned his attention to a different aspect of film culture—education—and to a figure who had been crucial in his own college years—the legendary Alicia Vega. Vega was much more than a university professor. For decades, she led film workshops for kids in the outskirts and poor neighborhoods of Santiago and other parts of Chile. One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (1988) documents one of the early workshops led by Vega, in which she teaches kids about cinema by making thaumatropes, watching early silent films, and going for the first time to a movie theater. Agüero’s documentary captures an indefatigable educator at work and, in the process, offers a moving portrait of children’s imagination towards the end of the dictatorship.

Programmed by José Miguel Palacios and Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto.