Bettina Perut

Since its beginnings, the documentary work of the duo Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff has stood out for the risk and creativity of its themes, treatments and points of view. With eight feature films to their credit, their poetic journey is full of turning points and mutations that have accompanied the technological and cultural transformations of their time, challenging the most stable and conservative premises of what is understood as documentary cinema. Their work has gone from a very physical and gestural first register linked to the lightening of the cameras and the voyeuristic impulse, present in films such as "CHI-CHICHI LE-LE-LE MARTÍN VARGAS DE CHILE" (2000) or "UN HOMBRE APARTE", which in turn emphasized the performative dimension of their protagonists (the boxer Martín Vargas in the former, and a fantasy manager in the latter); towards a visual stylization that began with the exercise of inverted ethnography "WELCOME TO NEW YORK" (2006), found a hinge in the ethical exploration of the field (and its limit) in "NOTICIAS" (2009), and reaches a climax in "SURIRE" (2015), a documentary about a salt flat in the altiplano where landscape, nature, animals and humans, are observed from a gaze that combines the sensory with materiality. Rather than conclusions, Perut + Osnovikoff's documentaries raise questions, interrogate the limits and common senses. This is the case, for example, of their two entries on social memory, on the one hand "EL ASTUTO MONO PINOCHET CONTRA LA MONEDA DE LOS CERDOS" (2004), where groups of schoolchildren represent the military coup through improvised acting, combining play and parody, telling us about a conflictive present that inhabits the bodies, an issue that they emphasized even more in "LA MUERTE DE PINOCHET" (2011), a "social fresco" around the day of Pinochet's death. Although their work has been discussed and even marginalized from some circuits, his proposal has done nothing but grow and open to new avenues, understanding documentary film as both a plastic and social exploration.