Ignacio Agüero is an architect turned film-maker who cannot help being an architect as he struggles to stop being a film-maker. A tough but productive battle.
Como me da la gana is his most honest declaration, made in 1985, where he goes to individual directors to ask them why they make cinema and for what purpose, without getting a clear response from anyone, and without Agüero himself knowing why he is making this film-question. As an architect, space slips into almost all his projects; sometimes it is an area of Santiago that disappears and buries the last of his shipwrecked souls in
Aquí se construye, at others it is a village populated with more memories than inhabitants, as in
La mamá de mi abuela le contó a mi abuela, and at other times it is that no-man’s land that constitutes the threshold of the front door in
El otro día. As a film-maker, Ignacio Agüero declares that he dreams of achieving a film in which the film-maker disappears and it is the film that constructs itself. Self-architecture, then. The solution arrives when he puts a cheap but effective scriptwriter known as ‘chance’ to work. In “a film made about the people who ring the doorbell of my house”, the Chilean director decides to turn his gaze back on anyone who calls at his home, and manages to show us two worlds: the inside world with its whimsical lights and dense shadows, and the outside world of a Santiago sketched in the best way: involuntarily.
