Machuca

Please join us for a special screening of Machuca (2004, dir. Andrés Wood), as part of an event commemorating more than fifty years after the coup in Chile. 

The screening will be followed by a conversation with Roberto Brodsky, author and co-writer of Machuca, as well as a set of talks the following day, October 18, at the A.D. White House. For more information, see https://einaudi.cornell.edu/programs/latin-american-and-caribbean-studies/events.

Machuca follows the lives, over the course of a school year in 1972/73, of two young schoolboys in Santiago, Chile. One is from an upper-middle-class family; the other from a working-class family. Both attend the private boys school St. Patrick’s, whose principal seeks reduce the class segregation typical to Chile at the time and to follow the lead of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government. The story follows the boys’ friendship and its relationship to the politics of the time, including the growing tensions in the city around Allende’s government and the right-wing reaction that would eventually result in a coup d’etat on September 11, 1973.

Based on a novel by acclaimed author Roberto Brodsky, with a screenplay written by Brodsky and director Andrés Wood whose own experiences mirror those of the protagonists, Machuca was released to wide acclaim in 2004. For the 20th anniversary of its release, this screening will include a talkback after the film with writer Roberto Brodsky.

Free admission. Cosponsored by Cornell Cinema, the Departments of English Literature and Creative Writing, History, History of Art and Visual Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, the Department of Performing and Media Arts, Romance Studies, and the Society for the Humanities.