RARA
Chile, 2016
Spanish with English subtitles | 88 min 
Director: Pepa San Martín

RATED: PG

Saturday, August 25th 
7:15pm @ The Cinematheque
Saturday, September 1st 
2:45pm @ The Cinematheque

With her first feature film, writer-director Pepa San Martín delivers a powerful but brilliantly subtle family drama. The story, which is both a poignant coming-of-age tale and a based-on-a-true-story account of a same-gender marriage threatened by social forces, begins with a tableau of relative domestic harmony: Paula lives with her partner, Lía, and her two daughters, Sarah and Catalina. Her ex-husband, Victor, lives nearby with his new wife, Nicole, and the girls shift easily between the two homes. But internal tensions and external pressures slowly begin to unravel the family tapestry. Standard mother-daughter squabbles and explosive moments of adolescent angst that are par for the course in any family spark heightened anxieties in a family with lesbian parents living in a conservative-leaning community—an outwardly tolerant Penvironment with a latent underpinning of insinuation and judgment.  Joanne Parsont, Frameline

“Wonderfully light of touch, full of well-observed human detail and even-handedly compassionate, this richly human film is full of the quieter values.” -Jonathan Holland, The Hollywood Reporter

Grand Jury Prize, Berlin Film Festival 2016
Horizontes Latino Award, San Sebastián International Film Festival, 2016

Desde que se separaron sus padres, Sara y su hermana menor viven con su madre, quien ahora tiene una pareja que es mujer. La vida de ellas no es muy diferente de la de otras familias, y la situación actualmente está bien con Sara. Pero no todos lo ven de esta manera; su padre, en particular, tiene dudas. Mientras se acerca el cumpleaños 13 de Sara, ella se siente muy abrumada: por el primer chico que le gusta, su cuerpo está cambiando, y, encima de todo, sus dudas de a cuál de sus padres le debe tener lealtad.

Pepa’s Shorts Filmography: Gleisdreieck (2012), La ducha (2011)

Pepa San Martín was born in Curico (Chile) in 1974, she studied acting and participated in numerous theatre productions as an actress and director. She began working in cinema in 2004, always in the area of directing, alongside most of the directors on the new Chilean movie scene. In 2011 she released her first short film, La Ducha, at the Berlin Film Festival, winning the DAAD award, consisting of a creative residency in Berlin, where she directed her second short film, Gleisdreieck, winner of Best Short Film at the Valdivia Film Festival in 2002. Rara is her first full-length feature film. 

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