Interview: Chilean filmmaker eyes potential in China, LatAm collaboration

BEIJING, May 2 (Xinhua) -- Little did he expect that on the other side of the world his work would be cheered and understood to such depth, said Chilean filmmaker Silvio Caiozzi in an interview with Xinhua in Beijing.

His latest feature film "And Suddenly the Dawn" was shown and well received at the Beijing International Film Festival this year.

Bringing his work to China for the first time, Caiozzi said he was surprised by the Chinese audience's warm response.

The three-hour-long movie, crowned "Best Film" at the Montreal World Film Festival last September, is set in southernmost Patagonia in Chile, where a man who has escaped from his native land out of fear as a young boy, returns in search of what he had left behind.

"I intend to explore the complexity and depth of human nature," he told Xinhua after the movie's premiere in Beijing.

The audience did not leave the cinema until after midnight, and posed a variety of questions on specific filming techniques to a symbolic detail of the content.

"I am surprised by their knowledge and enthusiasm for cinema. They were intelligent questions," said the filmmaker on his first contact with the Chinese public.

"One's work being able to reach out to so many people, regardless of where they come from, or what language they speak, for me is a wonderful gift, a prize bigger than the Prize," Caiozzi said.

Since his last film "Cachimba" (2004), the filmmaker said he took his time to fall in love with the new story and turn it into a work that was praised by the critics as "a consistent masterpiece."

What Caiozzi has been looking for is the complexity of human nature.

"Such complexity is what we have in common as human beings," he said. "The most wonderful thing about cinema happens when the viewer forgets that he is a spectator, he becomes another character and gets emotionally engaged in the movie. That means the movie is well done."

According to Caiozzi, the connection that cinema establishes among human beings, from which each one has the opportunity to explore their own humanity through visual attraction and originality, is the marvel of cinema.

Given that in China there are millions of movie lovers with a fervent thirst for better films, and Latin America produces ingenious works that continue to impress the world, Caiozzi said, a wider collaboration between both sides seems logical and natural.

"China is opening up to the world and eager to see how things are done everywhere else," Caiozzi said. "There is a brutal possibility for co-productions, talent encounters and film exchanges."

He suggests the likelihood that both sides will establish a "swap" mechanism to display a certain amount of each other's films every year. "I'm going to try to push for the idea to get going," he said.

"In a globalized world where the human being is becoming more and more isolated, cinema is what brings us closer," the filmmaker said. Enditem