Philip Kurian 2603275 LAH 4734 “ Machuca, 2004” Directed by Andres Wood – Chile Setting: For the Machuca film, the setting for it was taken place in the city of Santiago de Chile. It was based around a private preparatory school called Colegio Saint Patrick; Jesuits ran the school. Summary: The Machuca film was in Colegio Saint George that was a private school that taught English to boys by the Jesuits.
When a group of new students from the barridas (slums) come to the school they are looked down and get picked on. Pedro is one of them but soon become friends with Gonzalo who is educated and rich. All throughout the streets you see clashing sides that are protesting either for or against president Salvador Allende. Eventually you see army go into the shantytowns, they kick out all the village people and the whole place gets deserted. Historical Context The movie is based upon the period of when Salvador Allende was in control before the military coup in 1973.
In the film you can see a big difference in the way the upper class and lower class live, it was a huge separation in class divisions. Even though Allende made Chile richer, it only benefited the rich. Allende got legally elected, but still the military along with the United States entered with force to take over Salvador Allende to end his bad regime. Point of View: Andres Wood tried to show the film though a child point of view in order to capture a “ innocent perspective”.
This was an issue that split the country; he tried to show in that point of view because he did not want to be bias rather just more informative to show the history of Chile. From this film the state supported the vision of the film and the left wing supported it was well but the right-wing neighborhood felt it was more one side. Regardless it was a film that helped Chile to grow its movie industry, it was a challenge but this movie was popular and helps the industry to grow. Bibliography See PDFs: -Interviewwith Andres Wood -Machuca_Journal_Review
