Aldo Francia

Biography

If there is a filmmaker who embodies the so-called New Chilean Cinema, it is Aldo Francia. Although he was the author of a short filmography of only two finished films, Valparaíso mi amor (1969) and Ya no basta con rezar (1972), France understood cinema from the first moment as a collective action and his individual authorship always remained in the background with respect to his most beloved creation: the Viña del Mar Film Festival.

A pediatrician by profession, Aldo Francia developed as a self-taught filmmaker. As he recalls in his book New Latin American Cinema in Viña del Mar (1990), his first approach to cinema took place in Paris on a cold autumn afternoon in November 1949. "On one...