Five years in the making and posthumously completed, Pinochet Porn is a soap opera-like narrative about five children growing up during the Pinochet regime, and their subsequent maturation into adulthood. Shot on Super-8, this feature-length film is based on a 2005 hand drawn film script “Circus Lives from Hell”. The story weaves between personal, political, and historical circumstances, obliquely revolving around the political discord of General Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile. Within this story, childhood fantasy is permeated by structures of annihilation, which the characters later create in their own lives as adults. The story ends with the question: Is tragedy a choice? The title refers to the complex intimate relationships of the characters; but more so, to the regime’s systematic, sadistic destruction of individual lives - policies furtively upheld by the United States, United Kingdom, and the Papacy. The film is a document of an extended moment in New York and London avant-garde art and culture, featuring a range of artists, curators, writers, filmmakers, fixtures of the underground, musicians, and their children.

Followed by a conversation with Lia Gangitano (Participant Inc.) and Kate Kraczon (ICA).