Claudia Huaiquimilla

Mapuche director, scriptwriter and producer. She is also co-founder of Lanza Verde production company. Her first short film SAINT JOHN’S EVE (2013) was awarded at Clermont Ferrand. Her first feature film BAD INFLUENCE (2016) is the story of two boys, set against the backdrop of the Mapuche conflict, in which some indigenous families claim the land that once belonged to their ancestors. Her second feature film, MY BROTHERS DREAM AWAKE (2021), premiered at Locarno Film Festival. She co-directed and co-wrote the first Netflix original series in Chile, 42 DAYS IN THE DARK. She has also directed children’s series financed by the National Television Council of Chile, with an emphasis on children, territory and sociocultural heritage, in addition to working as a script consultant for different fiction projects and as curator of the Exhibition of Indigenous Cinema + Video, in Chile.

Director ́s Statement

“I’ve always been motivated to work with stories of minors that society classifies as "terrible children" or "bad apples", placing the audience in their points of view to understand the fuel behind their actions. One of the most powerful tools that cinema has is to give privileged access to the feeling of someone very different and to generate empathy with him. With this, I am interested in challenging the viewer to question their own prejudices regarding these characters. The first work in this line was a short film called SAINT JOHN’S EVE, that told the story of a young arsonist, whose audiovisual research gave way to my first feature film BAD INFLUENCE, where two young men classified as bad influences were trying to make a place for themselves in the world: one was a young indigenous man discriminated against by his classmates, and the other, a young “criminal” from the capital.
During the construction of the latter, I learned of many cases that occurred in the prisons for minors in our country, run by the State of Chile, where they suffered constant abuse. In one of them, young people organized a riot to demand better conditions in the prison, and it ended in a truly tragic way. This event shocked me a lot, but I was equally struck by knowing the opinions of people who were happy about the death of these teenagers, because according to them, they were simply criminals. This is not an isolated case in Chile and, during the last 15 years, the crisis that the National Service for Minors is going through has become evident, with hundreds of cases of dead children within the institution, which are reported as figures in the press and quickly forgotten. All this makes me feel a great need to work on the subject in an audiovisual way and give a voice not to “criminals”, but to young people who have been beaten by life and with a society that has turned its back on them since birth. MY BROTHERS DREAM AWAKE does not seek to clarify what happened in these various cases as a criminal complaint, but rather to sensitize the viewer giving them privileged access to the daily life of a group of children deprived of liberty, allowing their fragility and hidden beauty to emerge. After many visits to juvenile prisons while exhibiting BAD INFLUENCE, I learned a lot about these boys and their courage to face their lives. The viewer will discover a world behind bars without prejudice, observing the bonds of brotherhood that can arise in the least expected places. [...] It’s necessary to tell the stories of those characters that don’t seem important to the official history, but that are a reliable portrait of our society and its current problems.”