Alejandro Fernández

Alejandro Fernández Almendras learned to look at reality with a reporter's eye before stepping behind a film camera. Born in Chillán in 1971, he studied journalism at the University of Chile before moving to New York on a training scholarship. At the EFE news agency's offices, he wrote urgent wire stories while devouring retrospectives at independent cinemas across Manhattan.

That journalistic discipline shaped his working method.

His leap into film did not come through traditional film schools but from the front lines of news reporting. In 2007, he left his agency job to devote himself entirely to directing, after honing his craft with short films such as Desde lejos and Lo que trae la lluvia. The latter competed at the Berlinale and confirmed that his view of rural life avoided any hint of tourist folklore.

The Sharp Pulse from Chillán to Cannes

To make his first feature, he returned to the dusty landscapes of his rural childhood. In 2009, he premiered Huacho in Critics' Week at the Cannes Film Festival. The film followed a family of four from a humble background for twenty-four hours, torn between subsistence farming and the pull of modern consumerism.

And the gamble paid off.

During that shoot, he worked almost exclusively with non-professional actors to draw a raw, unvarnished truth from the scenes. The fragmented editing and tense silences set the project apart from the dramatic conventions typical of commercial theaters. Two years later, he completed Sentados frente al fuego and the documentary El salvavidas, two austere works that reaffirmed his outright rejection of non-diegetic music and explanatory dialogue.

The Cold Blood of Park City

In January 2014, the Chilean filmmaker's career was truly shaken up. His third narrative feature, Matar a un hombre, premiered in the snow of Utah with a suffocating story about a father harassed by neighborhood criminals who decides to take justice into his own hands. The film sidestepped the fireworks of Hollywood-style revenge to focus on the physical weight of hiding a corpse and the unbearable guilt of an accidental executioner.

The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance with a budget of less than three hundred thousand dollars.

But his triumph at Park City did not soften his critical edge. In 2016, he presented Aquí no ha pasado nada, a fiction film inspired by the Martín Larraín judicial scandal that dissected the untouchable privileges of Chile's affluent classes. Fernández turned to crowdfunding so he would not depend on public grants, and shot with lightweight cameras in just three weeks.

The result was a tense chronicle of impunity that once again screened at top-tier festivals such as Berlin.

A European Detour and the Rigor of the Frame

After years of dissecting the social ills of his homeland, he decided to test himself in unfamiliar territory. In 2019, he directed El estreno, a production shot in the Czech Republic with a local crew, Prague actors and dialogue entirely in Czech. The story followed the crisis of a provincial theater director caught between artistic ambition and family ruin.

There were no concessions to melodrama.

That same year, he released Mi amigo Alexis in commercial theaters, a family commission exploring the expectations society places on youth sports. In 2022, he took over directing several episodes of the Mexican series Dale gas for Netflix, handling complex car chase sequences with relentless pacing. In 2023, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences admitted him as a voting member in the directors branch for the Oscars.

In his European co-production contracts, he always insists on final supervision of the color grading and the definitive sound mix on 5.1-channel tracks.