by Luca Mannella
This conversation between Jeannette Muñoz and I took place a few months after the 61st Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro, thanks to the kind mediation of Stefano Miraglia and Cecilia Ermini, who curated a comprehensive retrospective within the festival. In addition to a vast selection from the Envìos series (2005 – ), we were able to see, screened in 16mm, Fragmentos Amorosos (2018), Strata of Natural History (2012), Villatalla (2011), Fuente Alemana (2025), and the two open-works Puchuncaví (2014 – )and El Cortijo (2025). Jeannette Muñoz produces a cinema of fragments, gifts and exchanges, open and multifaceted correspondences, where the camera and 16mm film serve as devices for approaching and bringing us closer to reality and its complex historical-ecological interweavings, affective tools for reworking the invisible stratifications of the past in the present, mending space and time. Her work rethinks traditional modes of film distribution and circulation, placing itself, as Stephen Broomer noted in his contribution to El paisaje como un mar (Lumière, 2017), in the tradition of twentieth-century avant-garde gift films (Markopoulos, Mekas), particularly the Envìos series, thus offering the possibility of establishing alternative curatorial practices within institutions and festivals. It is a cinema charged with memory, latent or visible in every frame. And it is precisely in this latency between visible and invisible, between past and present, that Jeannette Muñoz’s work and her films of “coexistences” insinuate themselves.
Luca Mannella: Before making films, you worked as a photographer. Is this where the connection with film and analog cinema (in your case 16mm) comes from? You are very interested in the material aspect of the image: what did your experimentation with alternative emulsion processes (the chemical-alchemical dimension of the film) consist of?
Jeannette Muñoz: Before venturing into film, I studied art in Chile. I was lucky to work with a group of very enthusiastic students. The main focus was the production of silver-based and heliographic photographic emulsions. Wonderful. It was experimental and research-based work in a chemical lab, preparing chemical formulas from the early days of photography—where success and failure were an exciting constant. Learning about the history and beginnings of photography through experimentation, and then applying photographic emulsions, understanding thoroughly what happens during exposure and development, was incredible. This practice left a profound mark on me.
Moreover, there was the valuable collaboration with Nicolas Yutronic, a Chemistry professor at the University of Chile, whose expertise was absolutely necessary for us art students. That period of experimentation took us back to the origins of photography and its anecdotes. We delved into history and were fascinated. This fascination still continues in my life today.
When I started shooting on analog film, I already had that experience in my body. Photographic material is sometimes unpredictable, and since you can’t control or correct anything during filming, it remains mysterious. It’s more than just materiality; it has an element of unpredictability. Things happen—exciting, sometimes frustrating things—because you only realize them after a delay. It’s a different way of working.
I love the idea of risk, and at the same time, I’m quite tolerant of the results. I’m not interested in perfection. Although, almost always, everything turns out very well. My lab experiences gave me a deep sense of calm with the material.
On the other hand, even though materiality matters to me, I don’t feel bound to analog film. It’s been more circumstantial than a fully conscious choice. When I had the opportunity in Europe to buy filming equipment, I already had extensive experience with analog photography, and it was a kind of dream to enter the world of moving images. At that moment, the most natural thing was to continue with a working process that, for me, was just beginning. And as I met a couple of filmmakers in Europe transitioning to video, I was able to buy equipment at reasonable prices.
The image on film is the product of a mixture, of a process, in a certain sense of stratification. Your cinema deals with layers, with surfaces. The surface of the film-image and the historical-geological-ecological surface of the landscape. How do these two surfaces, or layers, interact with each other?
The visualization of historical layers, of persistent or latent traces in the places I visit and film, intersects with the recording of latent images on photosensitive materials. There is an almost poetic analogy between them. Later, in projection, all these elements merge. Film concretely allows us to interact with multiple spaces and times.
The layers or strata I attempt to project are, however, much more connected to my memories and current experiences. I usually return to places that hold meaning in my life, or I search in new places for something that connects them to my memories and life.
Many of my projects emerged this way, like the film Strata of Natural History, the Puchuncaví project, Envíos, and the most recent film Fuente Alemana, to name a few.
In my memories, the beaches of Puchuncaví were in black and white, with lots of smoke and walks along dark, shiny sand under the cross-light of winter, until I had to return to the place with a camera and the intention of filming—to encounter the multiplicity of existences, living beings, and colors that abound there.
In Strata of Natural History, I also connected with the city through my memories—or rather, through an archival memory that is also part of a collective memory: colonialism and its practices. The Fuente Alemana (German Fountain)* appears as a reference to a parallel event in Chile, shown in an unfocused shot of the fountain and its bathers, acting as a citation.
Bodies, light, movement. Many of your films, starting with the epistolary series Envíos, seem to be constituted by the essential interaction of these three elements. What is the relationship between your cinema and these three words?
Bodies, light, and movement. When I read these three words, I feel that all of cinema, theater, dance, and many other art forms are deeply related to this trilogy. They are not exclusive to cinema, nor to my work specifically.
That said, I can tell you how bodies appear in my work. Intuitively, I began to ask myself: How does my body and the camera connect in the place of Puchuncaví with memories and other present and past bodies?
The answer came through intuition, feeling with and within the place. To facilitate that connection, it seemed necessary to avoid all possible hierarchy and to practice a gaze from my body immersed in a place—not at a distance, but entangled in the place. To entangle myself and be a part of it. Feeling like just one more thread in that disordered tangle of relationships.
Our bodies are not exceptional, and we can no longer think of ourselves from a standpoint of individuality—which works against life. What exists is a life integrated into countless non-hierarchical relationships and endless combinations across diverse realms.
I’m interested in this idea from the perspective of Stacy Alaimo, who speaks of the porosity of bodies, and of skin or surfaces of everything that exists. Bodies are constantly exchanging matter with their surroundings and are transformed.
The pollution in Puchuncaví crosses through bodies (my body) and transforms them. Bodies alter the landscape, and the landscape and its changes, in turn, transform the bodies. This reflects the situation we find ourselves in. A powerless, impoverished community must host the industry that promises national macroeconomic progress.
The Envíos series, to which Puchuncavì and El Cortijo are added, form a triptych of open works in your filmography. Can you explain this tendency towards open structures, the work in progress? In this sense, is there a relationship with the ever-changing performative possibility of projection? Are they letters in the form of questions that require ever-changing answers?
Open structures emphasize process. Envíos was the first open cinematic process I began.
In the early years after emigrating from Chile to Europe, there were many moments when I asked myself what to do and where to go. I started filming without a clear direction. I discovered something important in this emerging way of working: as I filmed and created bonds with people and places, I realized that this undefined form gave me lots of space for creativity.
It became a path—a sort of journey—where I found ideas and discovered my interests and new cinematic forms. Envíos is an act of communication and connection with what I left behind in Chile and what I encountered in Europe: people, places, memories. The people I love. The people I work with.
I’ve always stayed connected to what I left and what I found—they are a crucial foundation in my life. In this back-and-forth, cinema has played a very important role, because it was thanks to cinema and art that I found my place in this new home and maintained my relationship with Chile, and specifically with Santiago.
There’s another aspect I discovered with Envíos: its mode of distribution. These film fragments can’t be submitted to festivals as traditional entries. Their presentation context must be different. The fact that they are dedications or letters addressed to someone creates a different system—an intimate one—which can, in its accumulation, be presented publicly in a composed program.
Then I began Puchuncaví, another long-term and open-ended project. For 10 years I’ve filmed fragments in this incredible place. The fragments follow no chronology or hierarchy. None is more important than the other. And the time contained in each is a superimposition of past, present, and future.
I see Envíos and Puchuncaví as vessels that hold new ideas about how to produce and create cinema. They are works characterized by their flexibility. They are at once archives, film fragments, composed programs, and have been presented as art installations and in performances.
On the one hand, Envíos and El Cortijo are affective archives, films to heal geographical and emotional distances with Chile; on the other hand, Puchuncaví seems to be an archive of images on an ecosystem in slow destruction. What is your relationship with the archive? What is the relationship between your images and individual time and the ecosystemic realities they record?
What unites them is their resistance to fixed meanings. It is the ability to migrate between contexts, continuously reinterpreting them. An archive also has this characteristic. And for this reason, I have decided that for me they are a living archive. Puchuncaví becomes a place for reflection on the places where we live. How is life possible in a devastated place? How is coexistence generated between living beings and landscapes, everyday activities, and pollution? In Puchuncaví, life is possible, and so is joy, because it is not only a place of destruction, but also a place where life is generated.
Places and sites are also an archive. Taking an expanded idea of what an archive could be, I am interested in creating my own archives, but not with the inert intention of simply storing, rather to keep them in continuous updating. Presenting fragments again and again, which in different combinations create different filmic experiences.
I am also interested in talking about the genre of open correspondence as an alternative form of film distribution: a practice of personal care or a political practice that rethinks the circulation of films in an anti-consumerist way? Or both?
Both, without a doubt. Envíos is a project born from a desire for communication on both private and public levels. It is a gift. It is memory and a shared experience. At the same time, its fragmentary form carries an obvious risk: it prevents traditional distribution within film circuits, and this is a political decision. When I think of a project, I’m not thinking about whether curators will like it—making this kind of cinema responds to something deeper. It is a necessity.
Villatalla was filmed in Italy, in Liguria. The film and the landscape (and the people who move within it), their times and rhythms, become one, as in the cinema of Franco Piavoli or Straub-Huillet. Your films are always rooted in places, in landscapes. Does the place or the idea of the film come first?
The first thing is to be present in a place. To have experiences. The characteristics of the place become living images. Places, landscapes, territories are not pure; they are full of historical layers, contradictions, and as I said before, coexistences. They are the present full of past and future. Lives, living beings and specters, anecdotes, traces, echoes—all of this is a wonderful richness.
In Villatalla, I wanted to be present and slowly, as I better understood where I was, I began filming. That’s why the shift to black and white, and with it, a change to a more general view of the landscape, colors, and sounds, until I shared a personal experience with Giuseppe, the man who, at his advanced age, continued working on his olive plantation.
Like Ute Aurand, your cinema deals with a sort of ecstatic fascination for the everyday. How do you relate to the form, often worn out in experimental cinema, of diarism?
I don’t make film diaries, although I do value the idea of telling personal stories as a way to hack dominant concepts and codes. I am interested in the private, in the sense that it speaks of what is discarded, what is not spectacular or grandiose. I believe that choosing to film a marginal neighborhood in Santiago without stereotypes or exotic documentary ambitions is also a political decision. Telling one’s own stories is also a political act.
I come from there and I know that no one else cares about El Cortijo—not even Santiago itself. A neighborhood negatively stereotyped like many in Chile is known only for that [negative stereotyping] and is rarely mentioned except through [the framing of] a classist stigma. Nothing special seems to happen there; people live who work and strive, and also some who get lost in drugs due to poverty or marginalization.
El Cortijo matters to those of us who live there, who grew up there, and for this reason I have been filming it for 20 years. For now, it is another archive in the process of transformation.
Envío 24 (2010), dedicated to Helga Fanderl. The image of a Chilean tourist postcard, depicting three women from the Selk’nam tribe of Tierra del Fuego is superimposed, with a swinging movement, on the images of a hyper-tourist London. Superimposition as a historical leap, a political link at a distance, a technical form used in an anti-colonialist sense: as a Chilean transplanted to Europe, do you try to build an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist discourse in your films, to find a new way of using the tool of cinema?
I am not a political activist and I certainly don’t risk anything by doing what I do. What truly interests me is exploring the historical traces, the persistent layers in/with which we live. Colonialism is persistent, and I see it in a postcard, in a botanical garden, in a monument. I recognize it, and it becomes an urgent necessity to turn it into an image.
The forgotten pains, the crimes committed for scientific or ethnological purposes are always present in my work. Colonialism lives alongside us; it has never gone away. A society like Europe’s must know that its current well-being is due to the sacrifice of living beings and distant territories. It must admit that it coexists with this every day, that it knows perfectly well, but remains silent.
We are absorbed by a declining capitalism and persistent colonialism. My question here (more than a discourse) would rather be: What kinds of relationships can we generate to create a collaborative life on the margins, in a crack of this system? The postcard transforms into a filmic fiction—a dignified journey that never happened.
*The German Fountain—located in the heart of Santiago, Chile—was a gift from the German colony to the new Chilean republic in 1912, in gratitude for the transfer of land in the Mapuche Walmapu territory. In the heat of January 2004, the fountain becomes a symbolic space. Although bathing is prohibited, families from the city’s marginalized outskirts visit it and transform it into a public swimming pool, thus redefining its political and social character.
Luca Mannella is an Italian film curator and critic. He contributes to film and literature magazines, including filmidee and antinomie. In 2024, he co-wrote the screenplay for Nero Argento, selected for competition at the 38th Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week.
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