Carne de Perro (Dog Meat) shows the loneliness of a man and the loss of his value system. Without moral prejudice, the film observes a man caught up in his complex past. Like a figure of the collective unconscious, the main character Alejandro (50), an ex-torturer of the Pinochet regime, takes on the tormenting dialogue between past and present against the background of his biography.

The film accompanies Alejandro, who works as a taxi driver, at a very difficult moment in his life. He is a lonely and unpredictable man who carries around the enormous weight of his past as a torturer. When his taxi breaks down, the painstakingly maintained rhythm of his life is completely derailed. The past has become his greatest enemy, and we see how he increasingly becomes a hostage to his own history. In his search for a new identity, Alejandro gets lost between ghosts of earlier times and the obsessive attempt to come to terms with his situation.

The story tells of a man who has begun to unravel, whose view of reality is increasingly disturbed, who is cannibalised by his own past. Desperate, he tries to reinterpret his life and find a new direction for his existence. After an emotional and physical breakdown, he takes refuge in the community of a strange, evangelical sect where his needs for closeness and hierarchy are satisfied. But a person like Alejandro remains a social “residual risk” – unpredictable, like a sleeping volcano.

The events of that time were long ago. In the meantime, they have become almost foreign to us. Nevertheless, we feel the need to talk about the past with people like Alejandro. But in Chile, the time for such conversations is long gone. Like Alejandro, many people live there today – broken people who suffer from their conflicts – even on the perpetrator side. Carne de Perro approaches this peculiar kind of marginalised figure in Chilean society, who is readily ignored in times of economic growth and the self-image of a modern nation. The entertainment industry has accustomed us to the convenient stories of winners. This film wants to show a completely unsympathetic archetype of the Chilean consciousness landscape that most people today would rather forget very quickly.

Book+Director: Fernando Guzzoni
Camera: Barbara Alvarez
Cut: Javier Estévez
Production: Ceneca, Chile; Hanfgarn & Ufer, Deutschland; JBA, Frankreich
Sponsored by: Audiovisual Fund, Chile; Festival Biarritz; Foundation GAN; World Cinema Fund

Alejandro: Alejandro Goic
Laura: Amparo Noguera
Pastor Evangélico: Alfredo Castro
Gabriela: María Gracia Omegna
Raúl: Sergio Hernández

– 1st Prize New Directors, San Sebastian Filmfestival (Spanien), 2012
– Best First Feature, Havana Filmfestival (Kuba), 2012
– Movie City Award, Valdivia Filmfestival (Chile), 2012
– Ingmar Bergman Debut Award, Filmfest Gotenburg (Schweden), 2013