film/performance
Short Films
Here is a list of my short films. Click the links below to watch them. Some of them might be password protected. To inquire about a particular film, please reach out to me through the contact form.
Exhibition at Whitebox Gallery
WHILE I READ THIS LETTER / MIENTRAS LEO ESTA CARTA
2024, 25 min, 16mm, Super8 & miniDV to Digital (color, sound)
Anto(n) Astudillo (they/he) is a Lenapehoking/NYC-based filmmaker, performance artist, and curator of trans experience from Wallmapu (Santiago, Chile). Astudillo works with 16mm film, video, and performance to create moving portraits of personal and political themes, navigating dynamic interconnections between embodied practices and experimental cinema. In their words ¨For me, queer and trans+ cinema serves as a community, presenting stories within private universes or intimate spaces. It conveys a transformative truth that resonates deeply. ¨
Through the film included in this exhibition ¨while I read this letter/mientras leo esta carta¨, Anto addresses their family in Chile to share some of their experiences in the country of residence. This is an exercise inspired by the video-letter format of the AMAME project organized by the Ñukanchik People collective. After 12 years from the artist's decision to emigrate, Anto reviewed their personal archive of moving images captured since their arrival in the United States for the first time.
GREEN CASTLES (work in progress)
2024, 33 min, video (color, sound)
Green Castles follows Polo in their day-to-day life while they navigate medically transitioning, looking for work, and living alone in a lonely city. Though they find caring for plants easier than caring for themselves, an elder wise woman, Tia Silvia, constantly checks in on them and helps them on their journey. Every night Polo has the same dream: that they're slowly turning into a being made of plants.
Green Castles, the first collaboration between Anto(n) Astudillo and Kelley Van Dilla, represents a deepening of friendship through exploration of shared synchronicities in their lived experiences as trans and queer filmmakers. Anto(n) and Kelley also collaborate in building trans+ community, and healing care-centered filmmaking environments.
is a short narrative film about transitioning, caring for ourselves, each other and the world around us." The project is co-created by Anto(n) Astudillo and Kelley Van Dilla and it is currently on the post-production stage. PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING!
HOW TO MAKE AN AVATAR&RMB
2023, 9:46 min, video (color, sound)
In this two-chapter project I piece together the progression of my HRT process, using voice documentation and virtual scenarios to recognize physical and psychological changes. Both chapters are chronological evidence of a -one year- gender affirming experience dating back to pre-T days, when I first envisioned my nonbinary avatar inspired by my deepest dreams.
SOME KIND OF DIAGRAM
2021, 13:13 min, 16mm (color/black & white, sound)
Some kind of diagram refers to a dream I had at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis in NYC. It is a personal performative piece shot with different 16mm film stocks and short ends, which is all the film I had available in my fridge during the pandemic. The sound is extracted from a video testimony I recorded as a form of self therapy and that navigates through queer spirituality. In the film I explore different ways I embodied solitude, resilience and uncertainty during a period of psychophysical vulnerability.
THE PEOPLE'S REVOLT/LA REVOLUCIÓN DEL PUEBLO (PART 1)
2022, 15 min, 16mm (color, sound)
For more than 10 years I have been filming different protests in the United States and Chile. These protests have had a great impact on my life. Chile's “Penguin” Student Revolution, the Queer Liberation March, BLM, the Women's March, and the Chilean Social Movement that erupted on October 18, 2019, have been filmed with the intention of archiving history, as well as motivate in viewers a feeling of community and popular concern that generates resonance in the world. This fragment of popular uprisings led by the people focuses on the social revolt in Chile, documented between December 2019 and January 2020.
The inspiration of this film comes from the film program of the same name that gathers the work of several Chilean filmmakers and their response to Chile's social revolt of 2019 and the repercussions of the 1973 Coup d'etat.
TEMPLE ISLAND
2020, 7:05 min, 16mm-to-digital
Eddie Martinez is a dancer for Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. In 2009 Pina returned to Chile for her last residency before her passing that June. Eddie and I have continued our friendship ever since bonded by our love for Pina. In 2016, we collaborated on a short dance film. I told Eddie how I wanted to dance with the camera while he moved in the waters of Castle Island, MA. The film was shown as a 16mm projected loop for an expanded cinema event at the Boston Waterworks Museum. After that event I digitized the work print projected that night and created Temple Island, an ode to the body as our motor and our temple.
""I'm in love with the film Temple Island with Eddie Martinez.
Eddie Martinez is an amazing giver and Anto at that moment became a thankful and abundant receiver. I thought a lot about it. True, real and made me think as a viewer, how dance and body were for humans at the beginning. Perhaps people were dancing all the time when they would feel intimate. I also read that our body develops instructions at the age 1-2 and stays in our memory all life. It’s call just 'being at the moment'. Anto did a very powerful film!"
Almagul Menlibayeva (Visual Artist)
VU HA
2020, 3:09 min, 16mm-to-digital
During my time living in Boston I decided to practice a new martial art. For years I had been practicing Karate in Chile. I found the Boston Aikikai dojo and in it Vu Ha Sensei, a top aikido master who's family immigrated to the US from Vietnam. Vu Ha is a big fan of Akira Kurosawa's cinema and this film is na ode to both his passion to Iaido and Aikido and the cinema of the Japanese master director.
GOLPES
2020, 7:22 min, 16mm-to-digital
"Golpes" is a film that revisits the coup d'état of September 11, 1973 by the Chilean army on the Government Palace (La Moneda) through images that document the bullet impacts from 50 years ago on the walls of the nearby architecture. The film draws connections between the army of 1973 and the police force that protects the ideals existing within La Moneda, and that continues to repress both the Mapuche communities and the popular power of the Chilean people. Likewise, brief visions of the Atacama Desert appear as a vast landscape that once served as a container for thousands of disappearances committed by the State. The non-sync sound and contrasting picture reference the way the film was shot (HI-CON film) as the boiling discontent grows stronger due to the explosion of a social movement in October 2019.
EXO
2019, 3:47 min, 16mm-to-digital
In EXO the body of the performer is a vulnerable surface. The metal dust is the eroding factor altering it. As the body keeps resisting and grasping, transformation becomes inevitable.
ALMARGEN
2018, 5:50 min, 16mm-to-digital (super16)
Almargen' is a meditation on three major transitions in my life; moving to a new country in search of better opportunities, changing career paths, and going through long-term relationship break-up. I filmed this piece in Santiago, Chile in 2016, while also filming a short narrative piece ‘Beneath the Light’, in an effort to gain perspective of the current immigration wave in Santiago in comparison with my own experience. During the editing process I decided to make my thoughts the text of the film, becoming a distant observant of a city I no longer inhabit.
BENEATH THE LIGHT
2017, 34:03 min, 16mm-to-digital (super16)
Beneath The Light is a film that experiments with narrative to explore different mental/emotional states of the main character. The film is not intended to tell a story but rather to open doors and portals to situations that can be ordinary or extraordinary. Situations that we could all somehow experience during our lives. I consider this to be a dance film and much of the acting, editing and filming constitutes choreography that develops in time. Inspired by Ulrike Ottinger's episodic narrative, the film is an abstract spiritual procession in the life of a young actress trying to make sense of her immediate environment.
TE QUIERO TANTO
2018, 5:47 min, 16mm
Away from their homeland, immigrant communities gather in urban spaces trying to make a living in a capitalist society. Through local markets, small shops, street stalls, etc. vendors resist for the survival of their goods and traditions. Through the lens of the camera and non-sync field recordings, which include a conversation with a friend, a day in the local market with their mother and the music of Don Jermán Tejerinas, an oral storyteller of indigenous tradition (Atacameño), the filmmaker walks through neighborhoods in Queens, East Boston and La Florida, (South of Santiago, Chile), shortening the distances of these locations through resonant images and sounds, imagining a common space where all these experiences converge.
SANTIAGO BARBERSHOP
2018, 43:38 min, digital
Santiago Barbershop is a short documentary that explores a lively community of hardworking Dominican barbers and their diverse group clients. The film is an observation of men’s hairstyling in a Hispanic neighborhood in Somerville, MA. From the barber seat we observe costumers from a wide age range choosing style as a way to shape their identities and gender presentation. The musical choices of the barbers and the unique stories told by immigrants living and working in Boston during the Obama administration make the piece a cultural statement and a document of that particular period of time in the country.
WE ARE DMO
2018, 19:47 min, digital
This documentary project follows the journey of Dominican singer Sikosis shaping his music project DMO in an effort to become the next known hip hop artist in Boston
HEAD PLACE
2015, 11:42 min, SD video
This is a short piece shot with a digital mini camcorder. Using an embodied camera perspective I visit hidden locations in the city and those who inhabit them at night. The piece is an extension of my own desire to deviate from established public sidewalks during my regular night walks and visit places that have become "residues" of current urban planning: poorly lit back alleys are used as residential access, and restaurant's dumpsters, as rest areas for night shift workers.
Please get in touch to learn more about this film.
C. ROJAS/LITTLE RED SISTERS
2014, 20:34 min, SD video
An experimental narrative film that captures the performance of a new version of the old fairy tale (Little Red Riding Hood), replacing its original male gaze with my personal experience growing up as queer in a conservative country (Chile) and my admiration for women's resilience in a patriarchal society.
Please get in touch to learn more about this film.