1976 – BFI London Film Festival 2022

Writers: Manuela Martelli and Alejandra Moffat

Director: Manuela Martelli

Designer Francisca Correa has created a beautiful vision of 1970s Chile in Manuela Martelli and Aljendra Moffat’s 1976, a slowly thrilling story of social and political subversion told through a domestic lens as a middle-class doctor’s wife helps a renegade from Pinochet’s dictatorship. Muted colours, a mix of pink, taupe and the occasional rich red, Correa’s work is instantly immersive, taking the viewer from Carmen’s summer home to her charge’s bedside, hospitals, shops and the urban slums.

Unknown to her conventional family, Carmen is secretly attending on a young man with a gunshot wound hiding out with a local priest. Unable to get medicine from her doctor husband, Carmen does everything she can to help her patient. But when a young woman is found dead on the beach, Carmen starts to worry that she is being watched and, as she goes to extreme lengths to help Elías, passing messages to those who can help him, is the next closing in?

Director Martelli’s management of tension is really interesting. In the early part of 1976, the energy comes from Carmen hiding her activities from her family – the controlling, reductive husband and gaggle of children and grandchildren visiting their refurbished summer home in winter and the birthday part that is their purpose in coming together. But after Carmen takes a risky journey to Elías’s associates, Martelli creates a greater sense of paranoia, utilising several Hitchcockian techniques such as featuring a suspicious car in the rear-view mirror, filming the back seat and through the rear window of Carmen’s car rather than her point of view, all of which help to create a sense of threat that the film starts to build.

There are lots of spy movie conventions and tradecraft that creep into the story, including Carmen’s use of multiple buses to lose any potential tail, but what makes 1976 so interesting is the way these merge with the homely setting and a woman suddenly working outside her immediate experience – one minute Carmen is choosing a shade of pink paint, and soon she is receiving coded threats from strangers who enter that domestic space to disrupt her equanimity.

Anchored by a strong performance from Aline Küppenheim, as Carmen, quiet and subtle capturing the ordinariness of her character whose feminine skills and homemaking are challenged by Elías’s condition. We never really understand why she chooses to help at significant potential cost, and Carmen never betrays a political dissension or interest but Küppenheim brings great humanity to Carmen, wanting to help another soul in need and developing reserves she never knew she had.

A little more context could help an international audience place the events of 1976, but Martelli and co-writer Moffat obscure what happened to the characters and why, distancing the ordinary people from the extremes of Pinochet’s regime and the everyday reality for an ordinary family. This female-led thriller is a gripping vision of working beyond the State in even the tiniest of ways, presented in a vision of 70s design.

1976 is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2022.