Oasis

Chile is known as South America’s blooming oasis, at once marked by neo-liberalism and high economic growth, but also by poverty, social inequality and the legacy of the Pinochet military dictatorship. In October 2019, shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, proposed fare increases for public transport led to protests in the capital, which spread like wildfire across most of the country and grew into a varied movement for constitutional and economic reform. Over a period of three years, extending to the failure of the Constitutional Convention in 2022 and the political backlash that followed, Tamara Uribe and Felipe Morgado capture the events and their topography in sequences presented without commentary, giving the activist forces a face without siding against any of the protagonists: whether Indigenous, feminist, militant, anarchist or conservative, they find a place for everyone in this formally daring portrait of the era, which functions at the same time as a snapshot. Anyone who joins this journey through a society in the process of awakening will be rewarded with insights into democratic processes, mass protests and their socio-political dynamics.