Scenes from a marriage, viewed from the back seat of the spacious Mazda 929 that a Chilean family uses to go on holiday for a couple of days. Sensitive, personal debut by Sotomayor, beautifully shot by camerawoman Barbara Alvarez (25 Watts, The Headless Woman).
This Chilean road movie is set entirely in and around the car belonging to a middle-class family on a four-day trip to the north of Chile. It will be their last journey as a family. We occasionally catch a glimpse of marital problems, but the crisis is largely implicit. For instance, we often only see the backs of the silent parents’ heads, seen from the perspective of the children in the back seat, who only have a partial idea of what is going on.
The journey that starts so cheerfully with all kinds of games in the car quickly acquires melancholy undertones: the children only want to go to the beach, while the father is heading for a new life in another apartment and the mother primarily yearns for a place which no longer exists, where everything remains the same as it was.
Dominga Sotomayor previously made the short film Videogame, which screened at IFFR in 2010. That film also focused on a divorce, seen from the perspective of the child: a boy loses himself in the fictional world of a video game while his parents divide the household effects. Thursday Till Sunday was selected for the Cannes Cinéfondation Résidence 2010 and supported by the Hubert Bals Fund. –IFFR
