Charlotte Bayer-Broc
Los Diablos azules - Film - 48min - 2016
présenté dans le cadre de l'exposition Panorama 18
In 1907, in northern Chile, three thousand six hundred workers from the saltpetre mines of La Pampa were shot down by the national army in the harbour at Iquique, where they had come to demonstrate. The heroism of these early revolutionaries was related in La Cantata Santa Maria de Iquique, a long complaint written by Luis Advis in 1969, a year before the election of Salvador Allende. In the Marxist didactic tradition, this cantata alternates spoken descriptions, songs of the partisans and lamentos inspired by traditional Andean music. In Los Diablos azules, Charlotte Bayer-Broc has made her own adaptation. She began by playing the role of a grieving and solitary Madonna walking through a mining town. In this desolate setting reminiscent of a Western, the dual is between memory and forgetting, between the fragility of the voice and the immensity of the desert. The place is wrenched from its museumification, the struggle is revived, and the solitude is peopled with the songs of yesteryear and tomorrow. It is only when she has brandished a flag of peace that is always already stained with the blood of the workers that the heroine can, like those strikers of the early 20th century, go down to the harbour, where other women are waiting for her, ready, together, to spread the news of grief. As the story takes a tragic turn, as the workers are locked up in the school where the army will execute them, another community takes shape, that of these four storytellers, these camp divas. Bonded by the tragedy of history and the feeling of infinite loss, they become at once a chorus of traditional lamentations and an unlikely girls’ band, together articulating the promise of new forms of struggle. Olivier Cheval
Charlotte Bayer-Broc
Charlotte Bayer-Broc has developed a sensitive, political and critical thought watching movies. For her cinema is about incarnation and duration. She always were interested by filming gestures, faces, word – bodies loked in an inextricable reality by the frame. After theorical studies about cinema and literature, she get into the fine art school of Paris in 2011. Her work tries to reveal a hidden violence, to form new kind of narrations with lost events, mixing collectives and intimates stories. In 2014, she did her first movie, Mundos Inmundos, witch was selected by FID Marseille 2015. The movie is about a punk band roaming in depopulated and spectral landscapes in Chile like sleepwalkers. Nowadays, Charlotte is studying in Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains, and she is still exploring Chile minor history. Her new film, Los diablos azules, is a musical tragedy about a massacre of 3600 workers during a strike in the north of Chile.
