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Play

World Premiere

Argentina, Chile | 106 MINUTES | Spanish |

PLAY

Cristina Llancaleo (Viviana Herrera), a young nurse from the countryside with big eyes and even bigger headphones, walks the streets of Santiago like a silver ball in a pinball machine, shooting from one person's life to another's. When she is not reading National Geographic articles to her elderly Hungarian patient Milos (Francisco Copello) or flirting with a gardener in the park, she is following Tristán Greenberg (Andrés Ulloa), a 33-year-old architect whose wallet she finds after he is mugged. Tristán, who is temporarily unemployed while the construction workers on his project are on strike, has been dumped by his too-perfect girlfriend Irene (Aline Kuppenheim), who it turns out is also worth following. With nowhere to go, he returns to the suburban home where he grew up, but his glamorous mother Laura (Coca Guazzini) is living with a sleazy magician and is soon throwing a pool party straight out of The Graduate. In writer director Alicia Scherson's offbeat and stylish first feature, old Santiago indigenous rubs against new European in an international melting pot of riotous color art directed within an inch of its life by Sebastian Muñoz and shot in crisp HD by cinematographer Ricardo de Angelis (Man Facing Southeast). Scherson punctuates her script with playfully arch dialogue in which her characters quote Pliny, argue over parts of speech, and confess dreams as inconsequential as their lives. Because for Cristina, who continues her stoop-shouldered, flat-footed trudge through the city, lighting yet another cigarette as if it were her first, the game is never over.

CAST & CREDITS

Directed by Alicia Scherson

Alicia Scherson was born in Santiago, Chile in 1974. After graduating as a biologist, she studied filmmaking in the Escuela de Cine de Cuba, EICTV. In 1999 she went on a Fulbright scholarship to the U.S., where she earned her M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her short films have been screened and won awards at many international film festivals. In 2002 she returned to Santiago, where she now works as a film teacher. Her feature film Play was awarded support from the Hubert Bals and CORFO film funds and the Beca Fundacion Carolina from the Spanish Government.