“La Francisca”: Woman, young and poor, a film about precariousness in Chile

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Co-produced between Europe and Latin America, the film “La Francisca”, Rodrigo Litorriaga’s debut, portrays the harshness of being a young woman in northern Chile, a drama about the precariousness of the regions and the strength of a generation that has left its mark on the country’s history.

“The young people of Chile have been the engine of change; they managed to break the institutionalism that existed and achieved a more solid and fairer basis for our society,” Litorriaga told Efe from Bordeaux in a virtual meeting.

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The film, with the crew from Chile, Belgium, and France, tells the story of the life of “La Francisca”, a girl who lives in Tocopilla, in the Atacama desert, and leads a life more like an adult than a young woman: she works and takes care of her little brother, who has autism while dealing with her parents’ lack of understanding.

This scenario leads her to think about leaving the town to find new opportunities. At the same time, in Santiago, the student protests of 2011 are taking place; they are considered the prelude to the social crisis that erupted in 2019, the largest in 31 years of democracy, in which young people were major protagonists.

Litorriaga, who was born in Santiago in 1973, but spent his first 17 years in Europe – where his parents emigrated after Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état – returned to Chile as a student and became aware of “the economic and social precariousness” that persists in many areas of the country.

Since then, he said, he wanted to bring this situation to the screen to denounce “the late evolution of institutions in the regions after the military dictatorship”, which ended in 1990, and to “praise the role of young people who have been marginalized from politics” in recent decades.

“Adults delegated to them the work of change (towards democracy), abandoned them to their fate in a very hostile world, and the film tries to represent that generation that found itself in check with its own possibilities,” he said.

The filmmaker, who in previous short films has dealt with issues such as Moroccan immigration in Brussels or exiles in France, considers himself “Chilean by identity” and one of his objectives was to represent the Latin American country “from the periphery to the center”, and not the other way around. “With roots”, he clarified.

This is how earthquakes, typical of Chile – one of the most seismic countries in the world – are present throughout the film, just as they would be in the protagonist’s real life, and the sea or the desert become other key elements of the narrative.

“In the provinces of Chile, there is a lot of social and economic marginality, but there is also extreme beauty and many epic stories of people who abandon their families, often without resources, which must be told,” he said.

The independent film will be released in Chile on September 2 through the PuntoPlay platform and hopes to reach the big screen in Belgium and France.