Machuca

• Ariel Luna Mate: Pedro Machuca
• Matías cross: Gonzalo Infante
• Manuela Martelli: Silvana
• Ernesto Malbran: Father McEnroe
• Aline Küppenheim: María Luisa Infante

Machuca is a Chilean film directed by Andrés Wood from 2004, which depicts the friendship between two children from different social classes. The film takes place immediately before and during the coup by Augusto Pinochet against Salvador Allende.

Action

In Chile in the early 1970s because of the prevailing circumstances makes resentment among the poorer sections of society wide. Socialist ideas are popular. In the Latin American Church, liberation theology is developed that a specific occurrence of the clergy is in conflict with the view of the Vatican for improvements not only in the Hereafter.

Against this background, the school principal Father McEnroe makes at the elite boys' school Saint Patrick for the first time children from the slums, which are exempt from school fees. Despite initial difficulties developed between Gonzalo Infante, a spoiled child of the upper class, and Pedro Machuca, who comes from an extremely poor and dysfunctional family, a deep friendship. Both can thus throwing glances into the world of the other. The friendship seems to be strong despite ongoing attempts by the negative influence of two social Poland from.

As in school but escalates across the country, the conflict between the haves and the have-nots have the time to. At its peak Augusto Pinochet staged a coup to power and the country is sinking in a very short time in a military dictatorship. In school, the Padres are discontinued, demonstrating the absence of Christian ideas in a defiant gesture. Sympathy on the part of students to be punished hard.

Finally breaks the friendship but only when Gonzalo witnesses the brutal eviction of slums by the military. A good friend is doing while trying to protect her father against the ill-treatment by the soldiers shot and Infante denies in his impending arrest any relationship to the slum dwellers from. Thereafter, while the grim fate of the poor population remains unclear, Infante returns to the world of the upper class preferred.

Reviews

" Directed with care, patience and humor film consistently maintains the childlike perspective that is pictorially for Allende's dream of social equality. The collapse of reality thus falls out all the more drastic. "

Awards

The film was selected by the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2004 for popular international film.

Background

The film is heavily influenced autobiographical. Andrés Wood himself visited the elitist Saint George 's College in Santiago de Chile and devoted his work uncredited one Father Gerardo Whelan. The latter was, according to the dedication itself headmaster in the period immediately before the coup against Allende.