CHAPTER 5
A Journey with an Expiration Date: Notes
on Amnesia Letal’s Film Travesía Travesti
Mónica-Ramón Ríos
In early June of 2023, I spoke with Nicolás Videla virtually about the
provenance and significance of the archival material included in their film
Travesía travesti (Travesti Odyssey , 2021), how its production process—
with such a focus on Santiago’s city center—had suddenly shifted with
Chile’s General Revolt of 2019,
1
and about Videla’s stage and screen
femme identity Amnesia Letal. The latter part of this conversation reflects
1
Known popularly as the “Revuelta” and institutionally as the “Estallido social,” the
Chilean Revolt was a series of protests that occurred between October 18, 2019, and
March 2020. A rise in subway fares ignited the protests, which soon expanded to other
demands, particularly as the government violently repressed the protesters. On October
25, 2019, more than a million people took to the streets in a massive protest. Soon,
this became a decolonial, antipolice, antigovernment, anticapitalism protest. The popula-
tion, organized in local assemblies, demanded solutions to diverse issues, including the
rising cost of living, unemployment, government corruption, lack of access to abortion,
justice for gender-based violence, environmental decimation, and Indigenous representa-
tion, among others. More than thirty protesters died and more than eleven thousand
were injured. The end of the protests was marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, the
militarization of the streets, and the negotiations made by younger politicians with the
political status quo to make the diverse demands converge toward the writing of a new
constitution, a process that in 2022 failed, leaving the demands unanswered.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2024
M. H. Rueda and V. Barraza (eds.), Female Agency in Films Made by
Latin American Women, Global Cinema,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-72600-2_5
97