Too Late to DieYoung

With Too Late to Die Young , Chilean filmmaker Dominga Sotomayor became the first woman to win the Best Director award at the Locarno International Film Festival. This is the film's Asian premiere.

With Too Late to Die Young, Chilean filmmaker Dominga Sotomayor became the first woman to win the Best Director award at the Locarno International Film Festival. In the summer of 1990 after the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, a group of families try to carve lives among nature in an insular community away from the city. Brought to this remote provincial world by idealistic adults, frustrated teens Sofia and Lucas face their fears and yearn for love and escape. Brimming with the sights, sounds and turbulent emotions of its time and place, Sotomayor’s evocative memoir excels in capturing the prescient moments in a youth – and a country’s – coming of age. This is the film's Asian premiere.

Dominga Sotomayor Castillo

Dominga Sotomayor studied audiovisual directing at Universidad Católica de Chile, and Masters in Directing at ESCAC in Barcelona. She developed her first feature Thursday till Sunday (2012) at the Cannes Cinéfondation Residence. The film won the Tiger Award in Rotterdam in 2012. In 2013 she co-directed The Island , which also won the Tiger. In 2015 she premiered her mid-length  Mar at the Berlinale Forum, and the collective film Here in Lisbon produced by Indielisboa. In 2009 she co-founded Cinestación, a leading production company based in Santiago, a platform for auteur filmmaking in Latin America. She also co- founded CCC, Centro de Cine y Creación, a cultural center and art house cinema scheduled to open in Santiago de Chile in 2019.

This is a film about growing up in a period of massive changes, and for me it has to do with the nostalgia and the demystification of a period. It’s a coming-of-age story, of both the young characters and a society – Chile, a country that was growing after suffering the pains of dictatorship. I wanted to explore the uneasy relationship between generations and classes: to capture the wisdom of children and the foolishness of adults, the strange melancholy of growing up. With this film I’m exploring an open and free form, close to the nature of a community near the mountains, away from borders and definitions.