Cannes Un Certain RegardPsychology/Mystery/Suspence/ThrillerComing of AgePolitics
1992. By exhibiting a piece of Antarctic ice at the Seville Expo, Chile sought recognition from the international community as an ‘open, forward-looking, civilized nation.’ This was just after the curtain had fallen on the Pinochet dictatorship. But ice, by its nature, melts - and the truth buried within it merely waits, holding its breath, for the moment it can reveal itself. Through the disappearance of a girl at a Chilean ski resort, the film asks how ordinary people submitted to the violence of the era through their silence and became complicit in the system for the sake of their own advancement - revealing that freedom and liberation do not arrive through proclamation alone. As director Manuela Martelli has noted, the girl’s connection to East Germany, a ‘vanished country,’ underscores that this allegory of ‘thawing’ is bound up not only with Chile’s history but also with the global systemic transformations that unfolded at the end of the twentieth century.
Manuela Martelli is a Chilean actor and filmmaker. She made her acting debut in her teens and appeared in numerous works by prominent directors, including Andrés Wood and Sebastián Lelio, before studying film at Temple University. She directed the short film Apnea (2014) and co-directed Land Tides (2016). Her debut feature, 1976 (2022), premiered at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. The Meltdown is her second feature and was invited to the Cannes Un Certain Regard.
From Busan International Film Festival 2026, No. 31
