alr

Too Late to Die Young
(Tarde Para Morir Joven)

Director in Person
$12 Special Event Tickets
Directed by Dominga Sotomayor.
With Demian Hernández, Antar Machado, Magdalena Tótoro.
Chile/Brazil/Argentina/Netherlands/Qatar, 2018, DCP, color, 110 min.
Spanish with English subtitles.
DCP source: KimStim

Sotomayor’s most ambitious film to date also draws most deeply from her own life to offer a kind of refracted portrait of tentative youth and of Chile in the early 1990s as it emerged out of the long, dark shadow of the Pinochet dictatorship. Too Late to Die Young takes place in a melancholy hippie commune inspired by the ecological community where Sotomayor grew up, lovingly recreated in the same location in the forested Santiago foothills. Sotomayor carefully structures the film as an ensemble piece that interweaves different generationally focused stories of the commune’s inhabitants while also closely following the figure of an uncertain yet determined young woman, Sofia, played by the talented first-time actress Demian Hernández. The open walls of an unfinished house in the community emblematize some of the film’s most important themes: evoking both the promise and indeterminacy of the community, its close, and even dangerous, proximity to nature and the fluid boundaries between childhood and adulthood. A gently unfolding series of events and non-events give Too Late to Die Young a wonderfully rambling and spontaneous feel as it turns from children’s games to fragmentary conversations to an approaching New Year’s group concert that subtly reveals the performative dimensions of the roles played by the community’s elders and youth alike.

Too Late to Die Young (Tarde Para Morir Joven) introduction and post-screening discussion by Haden Guest and Dominga Sotomayor. ©Harvard Film Archive

PRECEDED BY

  • La montaña

    Directed by Dominga Sotomayor.
    Chile, 2008, digital video, color, 10 min.
    Spanish with English subtitles.

Part of film series

Read more

In a Landscape. The Films of Dominga Sotomayor

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2024 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Practice (and Other Works) By Martín Rejtman

Read more

Chronicles of Changing Times. The Cinema of Edward Yang

Read more
Gene Hackman crouched beside a toilet with audio equipment

From the HFA Collection...

Read more

Being In a Place. Rediscovering Margaret Tait