Cinema
100 Children Waiting for a Train
Cien niños esperando un tren
Ignacio Agüero · 1988
Synopsis
For twenty Saturdays, in a church in the población Lo Hermida, a working-class district of Santiago, the teacher Alicia Vega runs a film workshop for children. There they make the inventions that preceded cinema, zoetrope, thaumatrope, photograms, and learn camera positions, shots and framings; interviews with the children and their families reveal poverty, marginality and political repression. El Desconcierto stresses the wonder of children who discover cinema and become critical spectators.
Context
Shot in 1988 under the dictatorship, the film ran into censorship, according to El Desconcierto, which regards it as a landmark of Chilean documentary. The same year it received the first documentary prize at the Havana festival of new Latin American cinema, then prizes in Cartagena, in New York and at the American Film and Video Festival, and the Santiago critics' circle named it the best Chilean film of 1988. Its author shot it while working in advertising, reports Punto de Vista.
Who it is for
A hundred-minute documentary, tender and attentive; distributed in English under the title 100 Children Waiting for a Train.
Prizes and reception
Awarded in Cuba on its release, and regarded since as one of the great documentaries made under Pinochet.
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