TE AMO (MADE IN CHILI)

Sometimes the loneliest place for a child is located in the hyphen between cultures. And for Mike, Isabel, Sam and Daniela, that hephenate is “Chilean-American.” The four, teenagers of mixed Chilean and North American descent, feel uncomfortable in either of their worlds thanks to family dysfunction, careerism, divorce, neglect, and frequent uprooting and displacement by their migratory parents, who have kept them shuttling between two continents for much of their young lives. Finding solace and understanding with each other at a special American high school in Chile, the quartet used their summer vacation and a camcorder to pass the time at an abandoned house. Ostensibly their homede video horror production – “Do What Your Daddy Tells You” – is an amateur takeoff on popular Hollywood slasher dreck, but it reveals their angst and frustrations, role-played out before the unblinking eye of the viewfinder. “Teenage alienation” has long become a clich?d phrase, but for TE AMO (MADE IN CHLE) it is ithe wellspring of an insightful and moving drama from the director of “Gringuito” (23rd CIFF, 1999). (In English and Spanish with English subtitles)