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.
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 attack by the Chilean army to the Government Palace (La Moneda) in Santiago, Chile during the coup d'etat on September 11, 1973. Through images that document the palace and its surroundings, bullet marks on nearby walls, and the Atacama desert as a container of a history of disappearances and murders committed by the state, the film draws connections between the army from 1973 and the police force that guards the existing ideals inside La Moneda. The sound and the images are placed in hi-contrast as the boiling discontent outside this building becomes louder.
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 from acting to filmmaking, and experiencing a breakup in a long-term relationship. 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. During the editing process I decided to make my personal experience the voice of the film in the form of written interventions or subtitles that accompany images taken by me as 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
A film that gently explores the tensions between "belonging" and the politics of the immigrant experience. What it means to have a "home land" and what it takes to find one for these communities. Using 16mm and super8 film cameras, Anto moves from their childhood neighborhood in South Santiago, Chile to Jackson Heights and East Boston, neighborhoods in the US with a significant Latine population. In brief encounters with local people and a casual conversation with a long time friend, this film is an attempt to relate to the new country of residence while navigating a capitalist society.
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
C. ROJAS/LITTLE RED SISTERS
2016, 20:34 min, digital
An experimental narrative film that captures the performance of a new version of the old fairy tale, replacing its original male gaze with my personal experience growing up as a lesbian in a conservative country (Chile), my admiration for the female gender resilience and my dissatisfaction with gender inequality present in my life since childhood.
Please get in touch to learn more about these films.
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.
