Enigma

Ignacio Juricic Merillán / Chile / 2017 / 102 min
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  • San Sebastian Int'l Film Festival

  • Fribourg Int'l Film Festival

  • Int'l LGBT Film Festival of Barcelona

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Synopsis

Spanish with English subtitles

With Roxana Campos Araya, Paula Zúñiga, Rodrigo Pérez, Claudia Cabezas

Anchored by a potent ensemble cast led by the brilliant Roxana Campos, Ignacio Juricic Merillán’s assured and understated debut feature follows Nancy, a 54-year-old neighborhood hairdresser, who is asked to appear on an episode of a TV show about unsolved mysteries dedicated to the violent death of her lesbian daughter in the streets of Santiago a decade earlier.

As she decides whether or not to participate, she confronts her family and their versions of the events that occurred years ago, learning more about who her daughter was.

Ignoring the tragic event and instead focusing on family relationships, grief, and daily lives without closure on justice, Enigma manages to explore different ways of representing violence on screen.

Related Subjects
About the Director
Ignacio Juricic Merillán, born in 1990, graduated from the Universidad de Chile film school. His short film Locas Perdidas (Lost Queens) won the Second Prize of the Cinéfondation at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Queer Palm for the best LGBTQ short in the official selection.

His first feature film Enigma has been funded by the Chilean Culture Council and the Tribeca Film Institute Latin America Fund. It has also been selected in Australab FICValdivia, Rotterdam Lab, SANFIC Lab, and Lobo Lab from Mar del Plata. It participated in the work-in-progress sections at Guadalajara and Toulouse and had its world premiere at San Sebastian International Film Festival.

Press

“What is fascinating in the film direction is its play of mirrors, the movements of the actors on camera reconfiguring the spaces, with a truly sensational acting.” – Guilherme de Alencar Pinto, La Diaria

“Enigma is of excellent dramatic and formal construction. It has a very characteristic form, close to certain Asian films in which many people move and converse within the frame. At times, here, they fill it until there seems to be no more place in the world than that occupied by the protagonists.” – Diego Lerer, Mircopsia

Notes on the Film

“Monica Briones was a young lesbian girl brutally beaten to death on the street in Chile, on an early morning in July 84. Her death was a crime motivated by her sexual orientation, and the case never got justice. While the event is widely remembered by the local LGBTI community, the biggest public recognition that Monica’s murder was an episode of a television program about unsolved mysteries called Enigma.

The motivation for this film is directly related to the conception of Justice that we have nowadays. The observation of the actual events leads to the question of what kind of Justice we have access to, and how much are we willing to risk for it. What is the motivation for exposing such an intimate and delicate matter on a TV program of this nature? Although the idea for this plot is inspired by this particular event, the case can be extrapolated into those hundreds of Unsolved Mystery series, where a wide range of different people participate in order to make their histories more visible.”

– Ignacio Juricic Merillán, Director

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