Pinochet Porn (A Feature Film in Progress)

Ellen Cantor

Friday, January 6th, 2012 - Sunday, January 29th, 2012

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Pinochet Porn is a soap opera-like narrative about five children growing up during the Pinochet regime, and their subsequent maturation into adulthood. Shot on Super-8, this feature-length film is based on a 2005 hand drawn film script Circus Lives from Hell. The story while disclosing the intertwined lives of these five characters, also reveals its nature as a microcosm of surrounding political discord, cycles of destruction, and mounting violence. It is at once tragic and comedic. Segments of a particular history are made observable through the circumstances of the lives depticted, all obliquely revolving around the Pincohet regime in Chiles. Within this story, childhood fantasy is permeated by structures of annihilation, which the characters later create in their lives as adults. The story ends with the question: Is tragedy a choice? The title refers to the complex intimate relationships of the characters; but more so, to the regime’s systematic, sadistic destruction of individual lives - policies furtively upheld by the United States, United Kingdom, and the Papacy. This film stretches across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, extending across continents, countries, cities…. It reaches from the shtetl, the barrio, the concentration camp, into a digital age of increasing mobility and globalization. Yet, despite genuine progress, it describes a world plagued by colonialism, imperialism, fascism, and terrorism.