An Iceberg and an Epic It Wasn’t: The Strange Story of the Film About Chile at Seville Expo 92

The Seville World Fair in 1992 serves multiple purposes. For Chile, which had been working for two years with Patricio Aylwin as president, this was an opportunity to celebrate a milestone that could revive the country’s international image after the end of the dictatorship and attract the attention of foreign powers and investment.

For Spain, the host country, this was an unbeatable opportunity to emerge on the European scene, just as the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in America was celebrated (the Age of Discovery was the fair’s motto).

The first idea that Ignacio Aguero considered was compatible with that date. The camera will be on board the ship and then record a few moments on land. “I wanted to photograph the continent with the intention of taking pictures of Spain as pictures to be brought back after 500 years, as if to say: This is the colony today,” he says. Worship director as I wish (1984). But due to its high cost, the project became “useless”, as he recalls today.

The director modified his plan as he went to sea. Inside the boat was the iceberg mined from Antarctica that would be the star of the Chilean Pavilion in Seville, and which later became the focus of praise and criticism. The long journey that waited for them until their arrival in Europe opened up new possibilities that will end with the formation of 55 minutes ice dreamsIt was the first feature film he made in the 1990s.

“We stayed with the camera looking at the ice inside the ship, and then the idea of ​​a sailor trapped in a ship came up. What we did was turn to nautical literature. It ended up being a ‘nautical movie’ of this literature,” he explains, citing authors such as Joseph Conrad, Bruno Traven, and Francisco Coluan.

It evokes a special focus shadow line (1917), Conrad’s account of coming of age, and ship of death (1926), by Traven. “I met them on purpose to work on this movie, they were a discovery,” he admits. “More or less, the protagonist ice dreams It can be very similar to the protagonist shadow linein terms of what you experience.”

The mysterious and free tape provoked mixed reactions among the main people participating in the national delegation. The director notes that Fernando Linez, the general coordinator of the project appointed by Aylwin, did not like it.

“He wouldn’t like it because it didn’t reflect the Chilean engineering saga of the Northern Hemisphere ice structure. Imagine an institutional documentary on Chilean architecture. It didn’t interest me at all,” he says, adding that “others saw it too, like Eugenio Garcia (creative director), who didn’t have special expectations, but saw what he saw, and liked it very much.” “

ice dreams -which will be showing on November 26 in Paseo Bolins, in a special post for Fidocs- has never been interested in documenting what can be experienced during the World’s Fair. However, its author was shocked by the trouble the regulators faced when the cooling system was damaged before opening.

In a recent article by thirdGuillermo Tejeda, the project’s technical director, noted that Aguero would have said, “It looks like the iceberg is crying.”

After he burst into laughter, the director said, “What a great picture! Because the truth is I cried day and night non-stop. And the annex vault was a giant bathtub filled with water.”

“Lenez’s idea of ​​a Chilean engineering epic was a bit ridiculous, mainly because it didn’t work. The iceberg refused to be there, he wanted to get rid of it. So it was very good to consider her a claim to nature before this operation. Nature resisted.