Chile ’76 (2022 | Chile | 95 min |  Manuella Martelli)

Set several years after the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power, Manuella Martelli’s taut and engaging drama about life in Chile during the brutal dictatorship leaves the widespread terror offscreen. Instead, overheard broadcasts, passing conversations, and intrusive street violence hint at the horrors at the periphery of the life of Aline Küppenheim’s upper-class Santiago housewife. Leaving the city behind, she gets a head start to the coast to supervise the renovations of a her family’s seaside vacation home in preparation for her grandchild’s seventh birthday party. But there is no escape, even on vacation.

A surgeon’s wife and former member of the Red Cross who was never allowed to pursue a career in medicine, her first aid skills nevertheless find purpose alongside her usual charitable activities at the nearby church. She’s called there by a nervous priest as a last resort to mend the leg of a young revolutionary desperate to avoid discovery. It’s through this act of service that she soon finds herself enmeshed in an increasingly dangerous web of spycraft and subterfuge. As she goes about her daily errands, juggling family time with her small contribution to protecting an idealistic young revolutionary, the tension slowly heightens. The camera is always on Küppenheim, whose increasingly weary and frazzled performance effectively conveys the mounting emotional toll of maintaining the the comfortable rhythms of bourgeois life as her eyes are opened to her country’s devolution into suspicion, fear, and mistrust. A subtle yet deeply stirring portrait with present day resonance.

Chile ’76 has an additional SIFF screening at the Ark Lodge on Sunday May 14 at 5:30 pm

The Eight Mountains (2022 |  Italy | 147 min. |  Felix Van Groeningen, Charlotte Vandermeersch)

In capturing the breathtaking scenery of the Italian Alps, Cinematographer Ruben Impens somehow makes a 4:3 ratio more immersive than the widest possible screen. Within that constrained cinematic box, we marvel at the spectacular scenery of the mountains and the edenic isolated Aosta Valley, where two twelve-year-old boys — one the only child of the village, the other an only son of a vacationing family from Turin — forge a lifelong friendship. Although one boy grows up without ever leaving the village of Grana and the other wanders the world to other lofty peaks peaks, their high-altitude camaraderie remains a constant throughout both wayward lives.

Complemented by subtly realized performances by both the teen and adult versions of Pietro and Bruno, Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch bring an observant eye to the bond between men of few words. The action of the story crosses decades, nimbly cutting across decades as the boys reunite, drift apart as teens, and again find their adult lives intertwined as they reach major milestones on disparate journeys to understanding their own definitions of manhood. Unfolding over a generous two and a half hours, the film embraces the novelistic tone of its source material to form a towering portrait (and subtle cautionary tale) of the particularly male type of friendship grounded in loyalty to a guy you hung out with for a few months decades prior that’s grounded in long meaningful silences, manual labor as a form of therapy, the ability to grow beards, and achieving stubbornly long-overdue realizations. A long watch, but well worth the journey.

Although it has no more festival screenings, The Eight Mountains will open in Seattle on Friday May 26th at SIFF Cinema Egyptian.