Violeta Went to Heaven

Violeta se fue a los cielos

Andrés Wood’s bold and beautiful treatment of the Chilean cultural icon and folk singer Violeta Parra boasts a terrific central performance by Francisca Gavilán.

Even if a screening is sold out, tickets are often available 30 minutes before the start of the film at the box office at each venue.


Image gallery

  • Director Andrés Wood
  • Producer Patricio Pereira, Pablo Rovito, Fernando Sokolowicz, Denise Gomes, Paula Cosenza
  • Screenwriter Eliseo Altunaga, Rodrigo Bazaes, Guillermo Calderón, Andrés Wood
  • With Francisca Gavilán, Thomas Durand, Patricio Ossa
  • Chile-Argentina-Brazil-Spain 2011
  • 110 mins
  • Sales Latido Films

Andrés Wood has proved one of the most socially incisive filmmakers of the last decade. For his sixth feature, he turns his attention to the Chilean folk singer-songwriter, ethnomusicologist and cultural icon Violeta Parra, a key figure in the nueva canción chilena [new Chilean song]. Only this is no cradle-to-grave biopic; instead Wood opts for a nuanced exploration of a number of key moments from her life that are unpicked and juxtaposed with a television interview recreated for the film. The Violeta that emerges – expertly portrayed by Francisca Gavilán – is a complex, turbulent and fiercely intelligent woman, imbued with a strong moral purpose, a corrosive sense of humour, a haunting voice and an unwillingness to accept second best. Wood’s richly evocative film is able to show the development of Parra’s musical and social consciousness without ever resorting to easy romanticisation.
Maria Delgado

Director statement

For more than ten years we have been thinking about making a film about Violeta Parra. We couldn’t figure out how to portray this unusual and unclassifiable artist in a film of less than two hours long. What should we leave out? Her music? Her poetry? Her work as a collector of folklore? Her art work? Her political vision? Being one of Chile’s first feminists? Her untameable personality? It didn’t take long to realise that trying to cover every aspect of her life was going against her very nature. Violeta Parra is in constant movement. She is, basically, ungraspable. And this means, even though it sounds like a contradiction, that as time passes, her work and life become more and more contemporary. Violeta Parra died almost 50 years ago, yet the contents of her work are current; it is enough to see how she is an emblem for today’s Chilean students in their protests for better and more equal access to education. And even though she had no formal schooling, she created the university of folklore; and in spite of the fact that she learned to paint late in life, she exhibited her work in the Department of Decorative Arts at the Louvre Museum; and even though she didn’t know how to read or write music, she created songs as emblematic as ‘Gracias a la Vida’. That is why she is the most original artist of Chile, in the deepest sense of the word. We are proud to have made the first film about this great Latin American artist.
Andrés Wood

Director biography

A graduate in economics from the Universidad Católica de Chile in 1988, he then moved to New York to study filmmaking at NYU. After returning to Chile, he directed his first feature film, Football Stories, in 1997, and followed up with the television series El Desquite (1999), and the film Loco Fever, before further establishing his directorial reputation with the multi-award-winning Machuca, one of the most popular and acclaimed films in Chilean film history, and a selection of the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. He has also directed short films and dozens of commercials with Wood Producciones.

Filmography

1992 Idilio [s]
1994 Reunión de familia [s]
1997 Historias de Fútbol (Football Stories)
1999 El desquite [TV]
2001 La fiebre del loco (Loco Fever)
2004 Machuca
2008 La buena vida
2012 Violeta se fue a los cielos (Violeta Went to Heaven)