Not all the girls

Spain – Chile, 2023 / 70 min. / Colour

After years of residing in Spain, the film director embarks on the quest to find three Chilean women born during the dictatorship. Her goal: to depict a scene from Nona Fernández’s play ‘Space Invaders’ that relives the experiences of a group of girls who grew up between 1973 and 1992.

The director and the actresses – Klaudia, Andrea, and Tatiana – start rehearsing the play’s fragment in a seaside house, guided by an actress who will help them portray the scene. As they delve into their childhood experiences, the actresses embark on an emotional journey, using their personal memories to breathe life into the characters and emotions on stage. They delve into their memories to narrate a story marked by silence, fear, and both concealed the explicit violence in Chile during the seventies, eighties, and nineties.

The actresses reminisce about the everyday life of the dictatorship from the perspective of girls belonging to the same generation. This involves recalling common experiences and images that, however, are subjectively lived and interpreted. These experiences are connected to gestures, attitudes, and rituals witnessed and/or reproduced in the streets, at school, at home, and in the media.

In public spaces such as neighborhoods and streets, especially after the economic crisis of 1982, there were protests passing by, barricades, or military repression on street corners.

In schools, students paraded to commemorate dates linked to military history, while every Monday they sang the national anthem (including a forbidden verse honoring soldiers) and raised the flag. Within classrooms, children of military and communist families coexisted; meanwhile, a “red” history teacher could be abruptly dismissed.

In the neighborhood, the friend they often played with could be the younger sister of a disappeared member of a political party. The walls of homes resonated with horror through the few radio news reports that denounced the dictatorship’s atrocities, while television, mostly controlled by the regime, tried to show order and calm, distracting the population with family programs.

Most newspapers, complicit with the regime, distorted human rights violations, presenting murders as crimes of passion or massacres as confrontations.

But during the Chilean dictatorship, alternative media also emerged, generating independent content and attempting to challenge the regime’s communication control.

The film oscillates between the intimate and the historical, the personal and the political. Many young people of this generation experienced puberty and democracy simultaneously. The long dictatorship, which they came to understand but not to combat like their parents, deeply marked their lives.

After weeks of preparation, the actresses manage to stage the scene from the play ‘Space Invaders.’ However, beyond that, this process of exploration and expression not only allows them to bring the play to life but also offers them the opportunity to connect on a deeper level, sharing experiences that have shaped their lives.