De jueves a domingo

De Jueves a Domingo, Dominga Sotomayor, Chile-Netherlands, 2012, 94’, OV

In the first shot of De Jueves a Domingo, Lucía, 10, is asleep while her parents are putting suitcases into the boot of a Mazda 929, the luggage for their family holidays. Her father eventually goes up to her, to lift her into his arms and gently take her to the car, not wishing to wake her. From the very first shot of the film, we are being told we are going to witness an awakening. In the final shot, Lucia contemplates the three members of her family from atop a rock. She’s got her back to us, but we can sense in her gaze the premature nostalgia of someone who is probably looking at something for the last time. Between those two shots, so deeply charged with meaning, bold and technically impeccable, four days elapse. Four days that will force Lucia, the central figure of this journey from Santiago de Chile to the north of the country, from childhood to adolescence, from innocence to disillusionment, to face the monstrous awakening that accompanies the arrival of any ending that comes too soon, and which will change her way of engaging with the world and with herself. With the very title itself, Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor’s debut feature, which earned her the Tiger Award at Rotterdam, deftly deals with the beginning and end of this rite of initiation, in which she departs from the strictly autobiographical to fashion a film that is tender but unremitting, shrouded in a veil of summer memories, and which exudes the melancholy of what could have been but never was.