Interview: Chilean director presents in Venice story of solidarity and hope

"There is a strong element of human solidarity in this local community. They support and help each other,"said Chilean film director Christopher Murray on the sidelines of the ongoing Venice Film Festival 2016.

"From my prospective, in the places portrayed in the film, I witnessed the difficult life where abuses and episodes of social injustice are hitting the vulnerable populations," Murray told Xinhua in an exclusive interview on his film The Blind Christ (El Cristo Ciego) in competition at the film festival.

Murray is one of the Chilean cinema "nouvelle vague", who were described by Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera as the "discovery of the festival". Murray co-directed Manuel de Ribera which premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2010.

The Blind Christ tells the story of a man who was mocked by the villagers after he believes he had experienced a divine revelation in the desert. In order to help an old friend, he embarked on a journey, during which he would change people's perception about his "powers".

With a very contemporary message in a period of crisis, this "imperfect" South American hero reminds people that even in a desert, human's strong motivation in helping others is bigger that any presumed super natural power, according to Murray.

Murray was inspired by other films like Diary of a Country Priest by Robert Bresson, and The Gospel According to St. Matthew by Pier Paolo Pasolini."I like these films because they are able to create a peculiar expressive unique style autonomous from literature and theater," he said.

For Murray, a story should not come from an alien inspiration but from a concrete place or from discovering realities and communities.

The film addresses some contemporary issues. The Chilean director believes there were miseries and poverty, most of which were not exposed, beyond development issues that people talked about and the cold economic data people receive every day.

"Globally, we face a crisis involving wealth and power distribution. Therefore I think that the way out should be a better sharing of financial resources on the planet in order to better integrate the different communities," he said.

In the film, the desert has metaphoric meaning. "It is not only a touristic landscape but also a dramatic one reflecting solitude and isolation, there is then a sensation of abandonment from the political and economic point of view," Murray said.

The director said he chose the desert for symbolic reasons. It represents emptiness, because things are growing in the middle of nowhere in deserts, according to the director.

When voicing his view on literary works' role in producing films, Murray said that a film can "acquire" and be inspired by a literary text but it should reinterpret it using cinema tools and, it should not be just a camera recording a written text.

Asked about whether there is an encouraging message from the film, he said: "I don't think that films should give specific messages or moral lessons but I should at least invite to an open reflection. In this case, the positive hope is the humanity, which is reflecting a lot of light in a place dominated by darkness."

The director also voiced his view on Latin-American cinema. "In Chile, now there are multiple free voices, styles and experiments. This choral collaboration of various Chilean talents is giving good results but it should stay as something stable and structural in our cinema," he said. Enditem