Cristián Sánchez - Overview

Luis Cristián Sánchez Garfias (Santiago, June 19, 1951) is a Chilean director, screenwriter and film scholar. He studied, like several other filmmakers of his generation, at the School of Communication Arts of the Universidad Católica before the dictatorship. His films, all low-budget, have generally had little public diffusion, both because of their airtight content and because of the scarce support in the official distribution circuits. They have, however, enjoyed a positive reception at international festivals in Havana, Berlin, Biarritz and Nantes. It can be said that their cinema is "underground"; it is, in their own words, "a cinema of affective image, or of image-pulsion, in the manner of Buñuel". In his work he seeks to reveal "mythical relationships", since, in his opinion, "to reach a higher degree of complexity, cinema must deal with myth". He proclaims his affinity with what Raúl Ruiz does, although he differentiates himself from him - he says - because his cinema "is baroque" while his is more inclined towards an "asceticism of the image, and a more classical structure, of linear narration".