Please tell us about the projects you worked on before making ‘Wildfire Smoke – Sky Swallower’. How did you start, and how did you learn to make films?
In 2019, poetry led me to integrate Butoh dance plus the sound of Tibetan singing bowl throughout the reading of a poem of my authorship which describes the gestation of time. The performance, recorded on video, had good receptions and favorable comments.
Three years later I decided to record “Noche Lunática” at a hill of my city on a full moon’s night, thus resulting in the first videopoem working with the audiovisual producer Juan de Dios Ramirez.
Tell us about ‘Wildfire Smoke – Sky Swallower’. How do you describe it?
Humarola Tragacielo (original title) is a multimedia poem that narrates as a travelogue, through a series of images (some with animation) from the various disaster sites and accompanied by sounds of embers, the development of the mega-fires that occurred in Chile during the months of February and March 2023, which climax led to the appearance of a giant cloud of smoke that covered the skies of the city of Concepción on February 20, 2023.
Please tell us about your favorite filmmakers.
Sergei Parajanov: His concept of poetics in cinema (especially "The Color of Tangerines") evokes strong images about the subconscious, being able to recreate a genuine bridge between the dreamlike and the surreal.
Andrei Tarkovsky: The scenes in his films where he uses the poetry of his father Arseni Tarkovsky are simply indelible, achieving a perfect assemblage between poetry and the atmosphere of montage.
Elem Klimov: The narrative of films "Farewell" and "Come and See" manages to impose a unique rawness reflecting a constant tear and tension between the social conflicts it addresses and the psychological complexity of its characters.
Béla Tarr: A dark, omnipresent and devastating energy seems to unfold in his work, almost as if a presence wanted to intervene and provoke subtle but significant changes for the outcome of his films.
Andrej Zulawski: The audacity of his cinema triggers sudden and intense climaxes in which maelstrom stirs the viewer against any predictable expectations. He endows his films with swings where excess, surprise, mordant and sordid acquire a rhythm and an adrenalinic efficiency.
All of them managed to masterfully build and develop their own poetic language through the movies they've made.
If you were given a good budget, what would be your ideal project?
If I could count on a fairly generous budget I would go and record sounds and images on the Antarctic Peninsula and the Transantarctic Mountains, Mount Erebus and the Ross Ice Shelf with a group of professionals who have high-fidelity recording and editing equipment especially resistant to the adverse conditions of the environment and I would use the material to produce a poetic album, video poems and multimedia poems with the use of programs such as Sora and/or Klingai among others.
Describe how you would ensure that production is on schedule. What steps would you take?
Once the funding is set on schedule, the steps to achieve those tasks involve hiring an adequate and competent crew for travel and explorations in situ and professional audio visual technician team for recording and filming the location.
To contextualize them on the subject and thus develop a working timeline, it is needed to build a proper background on the topic. For that matter, the album “Permafrost” by Thomas Köner could work as a reference to the ambience we’d look out for.
The team would be aware about the narrative and poetic components of the script in order to develop a doable route that serves this quest’s aim, and so, be able to plan the visual aspects such as framing, transitions, costumes and to define a safe route to the places of shooting and camping.
Postproduction would work on the recorded footage to develop a master, clips, and various assemblage formats to suit the need for media diffusion, releases on different locations, so that the Antarctic regions explored in the recording get to be globally known before they thaw.
What was the hardest part of making ‘Wildfire Smoke – Sky Swallower’.
The most difficult part of the footage and the one that took the longest to complete was simulating the combustion of the copihue flower (Chilean bellflower), a very sacred flower for the ancestral Mapuche people.
It was very difficult to find the right person to perform this task, since the modified animation was supposed to last between 16 and 18 seconds. Finally, my friend Mauricio Flores managed to perform the miracle, after numerous attempts, combining his most satisfactory result with a generative video model from a clip provided by the audiovisual editor Diego Silva when he experimented with a prompt of a program that had just been released in a test version to the public.
The effect of the burning of the flower has a huge impact on the Chilean collective subconscious because it is considered the emblematic flower of the country, a challenge that I consider came quite close to the objective.
If possible, tell us about your next work. What plans do you have for your future work?
As a poet I am interested in exploring the potential of the poetic language of versification with multimedia supports and the resources of experimental cinema.
In this regard, I would like to address experiences where the forces of nature, the phenomena of the firmament and also situations typical of the crisis of humanity that we are experiencing today play a leading role.
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