Chile's 'Erratics' Premieres at San Sebastián — SkimNews
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- Thomas Woodroffe makes his feature debut with 'Erratics' ('Bloques erráticos'), which blends speculative fiction, ghost cinema and Patagonian hauntology and holds its world premiere in San Sebastián's New Directors sidebar
- Denis Lavant stars as Lucien Castelnau, the ghost of a French filmmaker who wakes inside a Patagonian glacier after a century of entrapment and wanders a technological society built on forgotten histories and indigenous memory
- Woodroffe traces the film's origin to a friend's serendipitous mix-up: she meant to send research on ancient Patagonian photographs but instead sent a paper on the recent discovery of the 1925 ethnographic documentary 'La Terre de feu' at La Cinémathèque de Toulouse
- Woodroffe, a cinematographer and colorist pursuing a Master's in Film Preservation at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, frames cinema as a ghost that 'can invoke voices from remote times and bring them back to life in the present'
- MPM Premium handles international sales, with head of festivals & Ibero-American sales Natalia Isotta noting the company 'rarely encounters a film that turns that very journey [of finding an audience] into the heart of its own story'
- 'Erratics' is produced by Fiebre SpA (Chile), La Belle Affaire Productions (France) and Un Puma (Argentina), with supporting cast including directors Dominga Sotomayor ('La Perra') and Felipe Gálvez ('The Settlers')
Why it matters: The premiere marks the feature debut of a filmmaker already embedded in Latin American cinema's infrastructure — Woodroffe served as cinematographer on Cannes Cinéfondation Grand Prize winner 'The Summer of the Electric Lion' — and gives Paris-based MPM Premium a distinctive title for its Latin American slate ahead of the festival circuit.
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