The Movie Teller

A film set in a mining town in northern Chile. The town is in the middle of the desert. The company extracts saltpetre, the houses stand in rows, and the only entertainment is the cinema. The family is five. The father works in the mine, there are four children, and one day the mother leaves. A cinema ticket is expensive. The family can send only one person, so a contest is held: whoever tells the film best will go. María Margarita wins. From there the girl goes to a film once a week. She comes back and tells it at home, and it turns into a performance. The neighbours start coming. Then the whole quarter; she stands on a chair and tells, imitating the voices and acting the scenes. It becomes a source of income. Ticket money is collected and the family lives on it. Then television reaches the town. What the narrative is interested in is not cinema but storytelling: the film is about how much the person doing the telling matters, more than the story itself. The father's line is sad. After an accident he is confined to a wheelchair, and living on money his daughter earns crushes him. Politics is in the background. Chile in the 1970s, the strikes and the coup that follows stand at the edge of the narrative. The source is Hernán Rivera Letelier's novel. The director is Danish and the film was shot in Spanish; that choice was argued over in reviews. Bérénice Bejo, Antonio de la Torre, Daniel Brühl and Alondra Valenzuela are in the cast. Lone Scherfig directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes period films built on a love of cinema. Who it is not for: anyone expecting hardness; the narrative leans on nostalgia and passes over its political background on the surface.