Niles Atallah

ALTER Presents: "Micro Screams Volume Three", a cursed collection of short horror films that are big on scares, but small in duration. Something sinister is in the air and on the walls, be warned this video vortex is sketchy, dirty and may cause waves of worry.

Pedro Lemebel, the writer and visual artist, defeated a marginal childhood to become one of the first to shake up Chile’s conservative society during Pinochet’s dictatorship. Dressed in feather boas, stilettos and a sharp tongue, he staged revolutionary performances that defied the era’s terror, he said what no one wanted to hear in a homophobic, repressed and militarized country.

6.6/10

María, a girl from Colonia Dignidad, in Chile —a kind of sectarian community, tyrannically mastered by the ruthless Paul Schäfer, a German madman, religious fanatic and child predator, who would end up turning the place into a torture center at the service of the military dictatorship ruled by Augusto Pinochet—, is punished for having lost three pigs, so she decides to run away and take refuge in an abandoned house hidden in the forest.

7.5/10
10%

In his travels through the southern sea of Chile, the privateer Francis Drake discovered a strange island. The extraordinary events that he lived there described in his travel diary have disappeared just like the island.

In the nineteenth century, a French adventurer sets off to establish a kingdom in the inhospitable South of Chile, uniting the feared Mapuche under him. The response of the Chilean army is devastating.

6.7/10

Just like in 1985, today Ignacio Agüero is back interrupting filmmakers during shooting, but not to ask what he did thirty years ago, but to find out what is purely cinematographic in what they film. These conversations are related to images in the director's personal archive, as if what is truly cinematographic was found among bits that were never made for the screen.

6.5/10

Blind and deaf people converse, question, surprise and educate each others. Fingers move about quickly, translation follows promptly, both visible and audible, hands get touched and squeezed, and out of their tactfulness, sentences, stories, reserve and emotions arise

6.7/10

A group of people gather for a family reunion in a house on an isolated island. They are waiting for the last person to join them, but as the evening arrives and he doesn’t arrive, a strange anxiety overwhelms them. The group dismantles and the family members wander away from the house separately, confronting the sea and an unspoken fear that slowly consumes them.

4.9/10

Lucía is a young woman who works as a seamstress in a factory and lives with her father in an old house in Santiago, Chile. The film occurs in December 2006 during the weeks that take place from the ex-dictator Pinochet’s funeral to Christmas Eve. Through the simple observation of Lucía’s daily life, the spectator is allowed access into a hidden and neglected world of a generation of Chileans striving to recover from the military dictatorship.

6.2/10

A man wants to become a TV-star and he will try anything despite his advanced age and what everyone says about him and his lack of talent and charisma for the job. But while he starts getting closer to his goal, his house starts crowding with unwanted guests.

Ten segments linked to a primary idea: an evocation of the early cinema images.

Luis talks about his life in the forest and how he fell in love with Lucia.

6.9/10

Lucia remembers the summer when she felt in love with Luis and her fear of the dark.

6.8/10