translated from Spanish: Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Alarcón dies in Moscow

“We mourn the death of a creative who leaves an important audiovisual legacy with his outstanding work,” the Ministry on its official twitter account.
“We regret to report the death of the filmmaker Sebastián Alarcón, based in Russia since 1969. There he made films such as “Night on Chile” or “El jaguar”. And in Chile “KGB agents also fall in love.” A few months ago he authorized Cineteca to protect and put online his work”, he noted the Cineteca Nacional de Chile.
Born in Valparaiso in 1949, Alarcón studied in the former Soviet Union, where he graduated from the country’s leading Cinematography Institute, the VGIK; he then tried to return to Chile but was prevented by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).
His work highlights the films “The First Page” (1974), “The Night on Chile” (1977), “The Fall of the Condor” (1982), and “Jaguar” (1986), an adaptation of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel “La ciudad y los perros”.
As highlighted by the site Memoria Chilena, “La noche sobre Chile”, which recounts the first days after the military coup of 1973, it was “reproduced in a thousand and five hundred copies and also shown on television in various eastern European countries, in which it was seen by more than eighty million viewers.”
“I am one of the most unknown Chilean directors, but I am sure the most watched,” commented the filmmaker, who lived in Chile after the recovery of democracy and where he directed several other films, including “KGB agents also fall in love ” (1991), “Cicatriz” (1996) and “The Photographer” (2002).
In “Cicatriz”, Alarcón recreated a failed attack on Pinochet by leftist Patriotic Front Manuel Rodríguez (FPMR) in 1986.
The dictatorship was a recurring theme of his filmography, with films such as “Santa Esperanza” (1980), which is about a prison camp in the desert; “The Fall of the Condor” (1982), about a Latin American dictator who is overthrown, and “The Bet of the Lonely Merchant” (1984), one of the most praised by critics, in which he approaches life in Chile in the late 1970s.

Original source in Spanish