Chilean actress Rallen Montenegro, who plays the title heroine in “Sayen”, the first trilogy of action films from the trans-Andean country that follows a Mapuche warrior on her path of revenge against a Spanish mining company that killed her grandmother and intends to appropriate their ancestral lands, ensures that although the proposal looks very local, its environmental theme “is repeated all over the world.”
“Our days are numbered worldwide, it is important to reflect on this and hopefully the cinema and the arts are a device for that”the 30-year-old young woman points out in a chat with Télam hours after the premiere of the film that marks her leading role debut in cinema, and that will arrive this Friday on the Prime Video platform.
The conversation takes place in Santiago de Chile and within the framework of a large event to present the film to society. The message is repeated on different occasions, it is proudly underlined: the country’s audiovisual industry has no precedent for a trilogy of this genre or of this level of production.
That is why the Original Movies division for the Prime Video region trusted Fábula, the renowned producer of the brothers Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín, to which much of the credit for the exponential leap that Chilean cinema had in the world in the last decade.
The Larraíns, in turn, summoned an expert in the field such as the Chilean-American Alexander Witt, who previously directed “Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse” (2004) and carved out a decades-long career in Hollywood as a second unit director of action movies like “Avengers: Infinity War”, “No time to die” or “Terminator Genesis”, among dozens of others.
“Sayen” inaugurates the triad of action films that have at their center a Mapuche woman who discovers the conspiracy of an international corporation of Spanish origin that destroys land and ecosystems throughout Chile to extract useful minerals for the electronics industry.
So that his dark intentions do not come to light, the unbalanced and impulsive son of the company owner, Antonio (the Spanish Arón Piper, remembered for his role in “Elite”), kills Sayen’s grandmother.
The weichafe (“warrior” in Mapudungún) will take revenge into her own hands and begin a chase through the beautiful and treacherous forest where, although she seems prey, it will be Sayen who reveals herself as the hunter of Antonio and his mercenaries.
The film, whose cast includes other well-known Spanish faces, such as Roberto García Ruiz and Enrique Arce (respectively “Oslo” and “Arturito” in the mega-popular “La casa de papel”), and Chilean artists such as Alejandro Trejo and Eduardo Paxeco; It was shot in the middle of winter and in a pandemic, between June and August 2021 in the Araucanía region, in Chilean Patagonia.
“It was action shooting in front of and behind the camera,” Montenegro recalls with a smile, about the experience of filming in extreme weather conditions. Paxeco, who in addition to playing an accomplice of the mining corporation was also the casting director of the trilogy, supports: “It was a challenge, the weather is a character in the film, the smoke, the cold, the frozen floor and acting there it already gave us a different weight”.
“It was difficult, with situations at 6 in the morning with -4 degrees, and other nocturnal ones as well, in the mountains with -5 degrees, everyone frozen, like with four clothes underneath to get through the cold,” he adds.
– This is the first action trilogy in Chile. How do you take this responsibility?
– Eduardo Paxeco: Super excited, super happy to be lucky enough to be part of this project of a genre that I love as a spectator, and now as an actor I realize how difficult it is to act an action scene. The technical requirement is gigantic and I am very happy to be able to show how we make action movies here in Latin America.
– Rallen Montenegro: I am extremely excited. I am grateful too. First action trilogy, right? It’s not one, it’s three. For Prime Video, it’s unreleased. If you told me at 23 when I was starting out, “in seven more years you are going to make an action movie” I would not have believed it, so the physical work was a challenge.
– The film required five months of research in which the production team contacted and worked with Mapuche communities to faithfully represent their history and struggles. Do you think that, even if it is a fiction, “Sayen” can help break down prejudices and give visibility to the culture of these communities?
– RM: I think there was a great interest on the part of the technical teams, of art, to do work that was as respectful as possible around the Mapuche culture. As a Mapuche myself, I think that from my showcase I also tried to make that the most respectful thing because in the end it is the town to which I belong. I think that fiction, which in this case is action, the Mapuche world provides valuable content to Sayen’s role, a way of appreciating and understanding, and I think that is the most valuable. I would say that looking for more depth in that aspect would be a mistake.
– EP: Absolutely, I think it is a very good space to be able to develop this story as a cinematographic universe and that it works because it is such a sacred space, so important, it works a lot in this plot, in which this character suffers injustice and makes be a kind of David and Goliath that makes it much more attractive to be able to follow this heroine.
– Is that what makes this universal history beyond the specific Mapuche element? Can the film help draw attention to extractivism and its environmental consequences?
– RM: Yes, I think the plot of “Sayen” is repeated all over the world.
– EP: In particular, my character Rubén is a mixed-race Chilean who perhaps feels a bit superior to Sayen and his entire community. And he prefers to follow this corporation because even if they destroy everything he considers it to be progress; a certain egoism appears from the ambition of wanting to be more successful by having more work with this company despite the fact that it destroys. I think that sometimes as human beings we don’t realize how valuable certain things are and we are more concerned with ambition, with what we can achieve.
– RM: Yes, it is happening, our days are numbered worldwide, it is important to reflect on this, and hopefully the cinema and the arts are a device for that. It’s a plus when a piece, a movie, manages to make you ask certain things. I hope so.
