Sanfic Honors Pablo Larrain, Regular Alfredo Castro With Lifetime Achievement Award

The 18th Santiago Int'l Film Festival (Sanfic) pays tribute to Chile's most internationally renowned and arguably hardworking actor, the itinerant Alfredo Castro, who will attend the inauguration of Sanfic on August 14 to receive his lifetime achievement award and kick off a retrospective of his films.

Also a playwright and director, Castro has worked across Europe and Latin America, performing in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and a number of Latin American accents and dialects, including including neutral Spanish. "I haven't worked in English but I hope to one day," he says. In the meantime, it has won a multitude of awards at festivals and awards events around the world.

Yet he would also be high on the list of personalities who have helped shape Chile's post-Pinochet film, theater and now television scene into one of the most dynamic, surprising and constantly questioning countries in the world. all Latin American countries.

Castro, 66, estimates he has worked on an average of five to six films a year, and credits the number of co-productions and streaming platforms that have given him so much work. “I think the pandemic has also seen a lot of projects put on hold and they have now been reactivated,” he adds.

He is now on the set of Pablo Larrain's dark comedy for Netflix, "El Conde", where he plays the assistant, a Chilean Igor if you will, of the character of the dictator Augusto Pinochet as a tired 250 year old of the world- old vampire.

'El Conde' is Castro's seventh film with Larrain, a landmark collaboration that began with 2006's 'Fuga' to 'Tony Manero' where he played a demented impersonator of John's 'Saturday Night Fever' character. Travolta, followed by "Post Mortem", "Non", "El Club" and "Neruda".

When asked if they've developed a shorthand after so many films together, he reflects, "I don't think so; Pablo approaches each new project with what he's learned from past projects at home and abroad. stranger, with new intentions, new ideas."

“I find such pleasure in working with someone so creative, so productive that I submit to him; I will blindly follow whatever Pablo tells me to do,” he adds.

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The Sanfic retrospective includes "Tony Manero" "El Club", "Blanco en Blanco", "Algunas Bestias", "Tengo Miedo Torero" and his latest, "Las Consecuencias" by Claudio Pinto, which opens the festival.< /p>

Among them are two of the films that gave him the greatest challenges as an actor: "The Club" and "Algunas Bestias". In the first he plays a pedophile priest and in the second he is a grandfather who mistreats his daughter, not physically but verbally.

"'El Club' dealt with a touchy subject and came out just as the massive priest abuse scandal exploded in Chile," he recalled, adding, "It pained me to play a such a role." In “Algunas Bestias,” using your voice to abuse a child was more of a challenge than doing it physically, he recalls.

Castro stands out not only for the nuance he brings to the roles, his chameleon physical turns and his sense of humanity that he brings to even the most ethically warped characters, but also for his willingness to work with a generation of directors even younger than Larraín.

“It is important that the scenarios that come to me have a political context, that they make people think and have an impact on the public in one way or another,” he comments. "There are so many directors I would love to work with but as long as the film resonates on a human, emotional and political level, I will work on it, with pleasure."

Castro, who trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and studied directing with famous French directors George Lavaudant, George Lavelli and George Lassalle, also runs his own theater, the Memory Theater (Teatro de la Memoria), in Chile where he directs and plays when he can. In November he directs the play "The Mother" with Antonia Zegers, who starred in "Post Mortem".

Castro will next be seen in Diego Lerman's "El Suplente" ("The Substitute") vying for the Golden Shell at the 70 San Sebastian Film Festival.

The 18th Sanfic runs from August 14-21.

John Hopewell contributed to this article.