1976: Manuela Martelli on her Hitchcockian thriller about life under Pinochet

Winner of the Sutherland Award for best first feature at the 2022 BFI London Film Festival, writer-director Manuela Martelli’s 1976 offers a refreshingly woman-centric narrative about Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship. It operates in a vaguely similar thriller mode to that of Pablo Larraín’s early breakthrough films Tony Manero (2008) and No (2012), but presents a distinctive and confident new cinematic voice.

Before her first screenwriting credit (working with fellow Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor on 2014 feature Mar), Martelli was primarily an on-screen presence, making her film debut as the lead teenage character of 2003 drama B-Happy. “I studied and went into acting because I was very curious about that world,” she says, “but in the back of my mind, I always knew I wanted to direct a film. I’d wanted to since I was a teenager, when I would go to the cinema a lot.”

Some of her acting gigs were as much about gaining an on-set education as they were about enthusiasm for the role. “I was methodical about this because I felt an acting background would help me a lot; seeing how directors would work differently, and different points of view about the process of directing. I also knew that I wanted to study film outside Chile, in order to have that experience of living outside and looking at Chile from a distant perspective. I was patient, and I think this patience also helped me in shooting this film because it took me so long to write the script and finance it. Film is, at least in many cases, a slow process.”

Patience and the resulting tension are crucial to the success of 1976. Set in Chile during said year, it sees a bourgeois housewife, mother and grandmother, Carmen (Aline Küppenheim), become a spy of sorts while she’s staying at her summer beach home as it’s being renovated. Drawing on her past Red Cross training, she agrees to a favour for a priest friend: to care for an injured young man who, she finds out, is a target of the government as a result of his resistance efforts. Such dissidents are referred to as “parasites” and “traitors” by the middle-class company Carmen keeps, but after she sources the bullet-wounded man antibiotics, among other resources, she also ends up becoming an intermediary between him and his allies, who believe they’re under surveillance.

While there’s no record of her own relative performing such deeds, Martelli cites her grandmother as the inspiration for the project. “I was really amazed by this woman that I never met,” she says. “During the 60s she wanted to go to art school after being a housewife and mother. We had different objects belonging to my grandmother in the house: a sculpture, ceramics and some things that I really identified with. I was really curious about her sensibility, and always wanted to go deep into her story.”

“This was the starting point,” she continues. “I was wondering how the life of a woman in her fifties would’ve been during the 70s in Chile. But I also needed freedom to develop my own character. I realised I was really attached to reality, and that I had to free myself. And when I said that, I found the film.”

Of all the years in the Pinochet dictatorship, why 1976 specifically? “That was my grandmother’s year of death,” Martelli says. “She was really depressed in the last years of her life. I think a lot of women were going through this. They felt unfulfilled, but they were really lonely in these feelings. They would live with the idea of them as an individual problem, not as a social one. I felt it was necessary to look at the social perspective. The year she died was one of the worst years of the dictatorship.”

The story is rooted in real-life elements, but Martelli did have certain cinematic reference points in mind in crafting the visual palette and general style, including Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959): “Since the film is from the point of view of this character, I was wondering how she would perceive the period, and the threat of the period. I imagined that her references were American films from the 50s because she would’ve been watching these films at 4pm on TV, maybe dubbed in Spanish. It was interesting to look at that horror with the tint of noir and classic films.”

Like many period thrillers set within specific political climates, commentary on the present was very much on Martelli’s mind during pre-production, although things were regularly shifting around her during the writing process. “As so many things happened in between, because it took so long, I was always wondering to myself if this film was worth making every time something new happened. There was the pandemic and then social outburst in Chile and the writing of a new constitution. 

“But I always felt that something was still the same. It had to do with how the powerful do anything to keep their privilege and keep being the ones who have the power to make decisions. This hasn’t changed, sadly. And we are getting into a world where wealth is being more and more concentrated in a small group of people that are deciding for us.”

1976 is in cinemas and on BFI Player from 24 March 2022.