Pacto de Fuga

Santiago at the end of the eighties. The last years of the military government. Members of an armed organisation are held in the old prison in the centre of the city, some of them under sentence of death. They decide to dig a tunnel. There are no tools; they start with spoons, forks and screwdrivers. Getting the earth out is a separate problem, because they have to find somewhere to put it. Months pass, the tunnel collapses, the air runs out and they dig again. Outside the country is changing and the men inside are racing the clock. David Albala directs. Benjamin Vicuna, Roberto Farias, Amparo Noguera and Francisca Gavilan are in the cast. It is a Chilean production. The film rests on the real escape of forty nine prisoners from the old public prison in Santiago on 30 January 1990. The actual tunnel was about eighty metres long and took eighteen months to dig. The prisoners carried the earth they dug into the attic of the prison; between fifty and seventy tonnes were hidden up there. The film was to open on 24 October 2019; because of the social unrest in the country the release was moved to 23 January 2020. The matter it treats is solidarity; the escape is not one man's work and who goes is a decision taken by the group. The narrative uses the pressure of a narrow space in the sections inside the tunnel. The film does not open its political side to argument and stays with the prisoners' view. Its limit is balance; the narrative carries many characters, some stay faint, and the historical background is not built enough. Who it is for: viewers who like prison escape films and adaptations of real events. Who it is not for: the cast is crowded, the images dark, and the ending tense.