Manuela Martelli and Paulina Urrutia want to ‘fight it out’ in the Oscar race with ‘Chile 1976’

Manuela Martelli is entering what she calls a “super challenging” Oscar campaign after Chile’s Film Academy selected her second feature, “Chile 1976,” to represent the country at the upcoming Academy Awards. The director said she and her team felt “very eager, very happy, honored and grateful” after being chosen by their peers.

For Martelli, the selection carries significance beyond her film. “It means representing an industry, an emerging industry with a great deal of talent,” she told Cooperativa, pointing to the broader moment for Chilean cinema. Chilean productions have recently gained recognition through awards and world premieres at major festivals including Cannes, Toronto and Venice.

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We are very eager, very happy, honored and grateful, because our peers chose us and because it means representing an industry, an emerging industry with a great deal of talent.

That momentum has revived hopes of seeing Chile return to the Best International Feature Film category. The country has not achieved that since Sebastián Lelio’s “A Fantastic Woman” received and won the Oscar in 2018. Martelli said Chilean filmmakers had already “conquered spaces, awards and festivals,” adding that they now had “a great deal of eagerness to fight it out.”

“Chile 1976” also has international distribution plans in place. Kino Lorber will release it in U.S. theaters in January 2027, while Mubi will handle its Latin American distribution, focusing on Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. Set in 1992, during Chile’s transition, the film follows a nine-year-old girl after the disappearance of a young woman triggers the conflict, told from the child’s perspective.

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We have already seen how we have conquered spaces, awards and festivals, and now we are very eager to fight it out.