“It was a way of understanding my own generation”: Manuela Martelli on her snowbound Chilean drama The Meltdown

The Meltdown marks the second chapter in writer-director Manuela Martelli’s planned trilogy exploring the consequences of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Following the success of 1976, winner of the Sutherland Award for best first feature at the BFI London Film Festival in 2022, Martelli once again approaches Chilean history through intimate experience rather than political leaders or historical figures, focusing instead on the lives of ordinary people shaped by larger forces.

Set in 1992, following Chile’s fragile transition to democracy, the film uses the archival image of an iceberg – which was transported from Chilean Antarctica to be displayed at an expo in Seville – to explore how national identity is shaped as much by what is hidden as by what is visible. Through the eyes of nine-year-old Inés (Maya O’Rourke), who spends a winter in her grandparents’ snowbound hotel high in the Andes, Martelli captures a world of silences, inequalities and half-understood truths.

As Inés befriends a young German skier, Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala), she begins to uncover the tensions surrounding her, turning the hotel into a microcosm of a country still reckoning with its past. Enhanced by Mariá Portugal’s haunting score, The Meltdown is an intimate coming-of-age story about memory, class and historical inheritance. It is Chile’s official submission for the Best International Feature Film category at the 99th Academy Awards.

Georgia Korossi: Why was it important for you to place a young girl at the centre of the story and what does her relationship with her cousin reveal about the wider themes of the film?

Manuela Martelli: I was interested in exploring Chile’s transition period because, although democracy had returned, the dictatorship was still present in many ways. It’s a grey and often overlooked moment in history. I approached it through a young girl who is losing her innocence and entering the wider world. Through her perspective, I could explore what it meant to grow up at that time.

It was also a way of understanding my own generation. We grew up in a society shaped by neoliberalism and consumer culture, while also living with the contradictions of a fragile democracy. Those tensions are reflected in the character’s experience and her relationship with her cousin.

What did the character of the young skier Hanna come to represent to you during the writing process?

Hanna embodies a desire for freedom. The story takes place at a time when women were beginning to enter public spaces, but society was still deeply patriarchal. Women faced many restrictions, and I was interested in exploring what happens when a teenage girl tries to find her own place within that environment.

Through Hanna, I wanted to observe how difficult it was for a young woman to carve out a place for herself in a society that remained very macho and restrictive.

The hotel becomes a microcosm of Chilean society. Was it important for you that the setting itself reflect the inequalities and tensions running through the story?

Yes, absolutely. I was interested in how social and gender hierarchies are reproduced in everyday life. I often think of my grandmother asking the girls to tidy the boys’ rooms. Small gestures like that reveal how expectations are passed on.

What interested me was the relationship between the private and public spheres, and how they reinforce one another. The hotel was fascinating because it makes those dynamics visible. It’s a space built around appearances, what is shown and what remains hidden.

There are the owners, workers, wealthy guests and foreign visitors occupying different positions within the same space. During the 1990s, access to travel was itself a marker of privilege. That raised questions about who has a voice, who is represented, and who performs the labour that makes everything possible.

Why did you create such a distance between Inés and her parents?

I think many children who grew up during the 1990s experienced a certain loneliness. Children were often given a great deal of independence, while their parents were dealing with the trauma left by the dictatorship and wider social changes. As more women entered the workforce, many children were raised by nannies or caregivers, who often had to leave their own children with someone else.

I was interested in that mixture of affection, labour and distance. Many of us were raised by people who genuinely cared for us but were also employees. That ambiguity reflected the larger ambiguity of the period itself, when Chile was asking fundamental questions about responsibility, care, labour and what kind of society it wanted to become.

The film seems to question Chile’s relationship with Europe, ideas of progress and development, and indigenous identity.

I was interested in the contradiction of Chile presenting itself to the world through the image of an iceberg. There was a desire to be seen as modern, developed and connected to Europe, but that aspiration was tied to assumptions about what counts as development.

Europe was often associated with progress, while Latin America, and particularly indigenous cultures, were seen as less developed. Those are ideas that many of us internalised. Indigenous identity was often associated with underdevelopment or something to be ashamed of, which I think is deeply wrong. For me, questioning those inherited ideas about development is an important part of understanding who we are.

What drew you to the image of the iceberg?

When I started thinking about the film, the iceberg was one of the images that stayed with me most strongly from childhood. As I revisited it, I realised how much that image contained. It seemed to concentrate many of the contradictions of the country and that moment in history. The iceberg became a prism that could reflect different meanings depending on how you looked at it. It speaks to ideas of spectacle and ambition but also raises questions about what was happening beneath the surface and what it was meant to conceal or represent.

For me, the iceberg became an image capable of containing many different ideas and contradictions at once, from Chilean history to broader questions about ecology and climate change.

Snow feels almost like a character in the film. What does it represent for you?

I became increasingly aware of snow while making the film, because I could see it disappearing. At times I felt as though I was making a record of something that might soon be gone. What interests me about snow is its contradictory nature. It creates both silence and clarity, while covering whatever lies underneath.

Snow also feels like a reflection on time. It’s temporary, fragile and constantly changing. That felt connected to the period portrayed in the film. There were things buried beneath the surface, covered over but never entirely gone.

Why is the landscape so important to your understanding of Chile?

The Andes and the snow were always there when I was growing up. Every winter they were part of our lives. They were so present that sometimes we stopped seeing them. The mountains are deeply connected to Chilean identity. They shape how we experience the country, but they’re also something we can take for granted because they’re always in front of us.

What are your thoughts about what younger generations inherit?

I grew up in a country that embraced an economic model promising prosperity and wellbeing. While it produced wealth, it also created a deeply individualistic society in which consumerism became central to our values.

What concerns me most is the loss of empathy and collective responsibility. Curiosity has increasingly been replaced by speed, constant stimulation and the pressure to move from one thing to the next. Living in a world flooded with information, we are losing the ability to sit with complexity and observe deeply. We risk becoming spectators rather than participants, documenting everything without always allowing ourselves to be affected by what we see.

For me, our responsibility is to remain curious, cultivate empathy and preserve our capacity to be moved by other people and by the world.

The Meltdown screened at the 70th BFI London Film Festival.