The cast and crew behind the film El Conde (“The Count”), debuting at the Venice International Film Festival this week, said depicting late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a vampire was “necessary” because the “extreme right” was gaining ground around the world.
Augusto Pinochet was a Chilean general who took power via a coup ousting socialist Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. Pinochet’s dictatorship lasted until 1990 when he stepped down following a national vote to return to democracy and a subsequent presidential election. Patricio Aylwin became the first post-dictatorship elected leader of the country with no intervention on Pinochet’s part. The general died in 2006.
“Pinochet had never been portrayed in film or TV before,” Pablo Larrain, the director of El Conde, said during a press conference in Venice ahead of the film’s premiere on Thursday. “The approach we chose led us to combine elements of farce and satire.”
Pinochet appears in the movie as a 250-year-old vampire.
“It’s probably the only way [to depict Pinochet],” Larrain claimed. “If you avoid satire there is a risk of creating empathy, and that’s not acceptable.”
“This is a film that can start a national conversation,” actress Paula Luchsinger, who plays a nun in the movie, said. “There is a resurgence of the extreme right in Chile and this is a necessary film because it reminds us that Pinochet went unpunished.”
“It’s also necessary because the wind of the extreme right isn’t just blowing in Chile,” she added. “It’s blowing around the world.”
Luchsinger reportedly did not elaborate on her concerns about “the wind of the extreme right.” Latin America is currently governed by majority leftist regimes, including Chile under radical leftist President Gabriel Boric.
Latin America is home to three authoritarian regimes, all of which self-identify as either communist and/or socialist: the communist Castro regime in Cuba, established in 1959 by murderous dictator Fidel Castro after violently taking over power in the island nation; the Sandinista Ortega regime in Nicaragua, which has ruled the nation on-and-off for roughly four decades; and the socialist Maduro regime in Venezuela, which is approaching its 25th year in power after late dictator Hugo Chávez took office in 1999.
The majority of Latin America is presently ruled by leftist governments or is about to be, asin the case of Guatemala, where leftist Bernardo Arévalo was elected president in August. Colombia currently has its first-ever leftist president, Gustavo Petro, a former member of the Marxist M19 guerrilla.
Chile’s president, Boric, has described himself as “to the left of” Chile’s Communist Party. This week, Boric officially decreed two days of mourning after the passing of Guillermo Teillier, president of the Chilean Communist Party — a move highly criticized by Chilean right-wing congressmen.
Chile is also presently entangled in a multi-year process to replace its current constitution, established in 1980 during Pinochet’s dictatorship. The process, which began as one of a series of demands by violent leftist rioters in 2019, failed for the first time in 2022 after Chileans overwhelmingly voted to reject a proposed new far-left constitution in September 2022.
A second attempt, whose proceedings began earlier in 2023, resulted in a majority conservative Constitutional Council. A new referendum to replace the constitution is projected to fail, according to a recent survey.
Larrain’s filmography includes Spencer (2021), starring American actress Kristen Stewart as Diana, Princess of Wales, and Jackie (2016), starring Natalie Portman as former American First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
El Conde stars Chilean actors Jaime Vadell as Pinochet and Gloria Münchmeyer as Lucía Hiriart, Pinochet’s wife and former Chilean First Lady. El Conde is scheduled to release on Netflix on September 15, 2023, four days after the 50th anniversary of Pinochet’s coup. The film will also see a limited theatrical release on September 7 in the United States, the United Kingdom, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico.
“Augusto Pinochet is a vampire ready to die, but the vultures around him won’t let him go without one last bite,” the film’s description reads.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.