Projects
Cuerpo Celeste
After the death of her father, Celeste loses the edges of her life. Everything changes, her body too.
It is 1990, and while Chile returns to democracy, 16-year-old Celeste lives the last New Year of her adolescence in a coast town in the Atacama desert. After the sudden death of her father, her mother Consuelo falls into a personal crisis, leaving Celeste in the care of her sister, away from the town. Months later, there is a solar eclipse in the area and Celeste comes back to see it with her mother. Nothing is the same: the mother has decided to sell the family house, the daughter hides a pregnancy, and in the coast a thermoelectric plant has perverted the environment. The desert where she used to search for fossils with her father has become the forensic territory of the dictatorship. During the eclipse, Celeste’s pregnancy will be an open secret and the young woman will have to face not only a violent environment, but also the fragility of her mother. Amid the gloom and shadows, Celeste will understand that in the world of the living and the dead, love is the only thing that transcends.
Between 2016 and 2018, my son, my mother and my father-in-law died. My heart stopped in the embrace of death. I began to remember. I lived my childhood in a town in the Atacama desert with a group that escaped the dictatorship to live as a community, with respect for ancestral cultures. I lost myself in the desert and its colours, shadows, the dry and cold air, strewn with fossils. At the age of 13 I had certainty that they burned. Today I remember that heat. I grew up in a dictatorship, afraid that my parents would disappear. When we recovered democracy in 1989, we had hope for our future. 30 years later, in 2019, high school students jumped the subway turnstile, initiating a revolution. Celeste would be almost my age today and surely her son would be one of those young people who jumped the turnstile of the subway. Today my son would be 6 years old, and I dream that he would have a future, a place on earth. We have no time to wait, the transcendence occurs today and it is through love.
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