El deshielo
2026, 108 min.

pre-premiere screening

Awards and selections: Cannes Film Festival 2026 – Un Certain Regard, Oscars 2027 – Chilean contender for the Best International Feature Film nomination
Cast: Maya O’Rourke, Saskia Rosendahl, Maia Domagala, Jakub Gierszał, Paulina Urrutia, Mauricio Pešutić
Country: Chile, USA, Spain, Mexico

[IN-PERSON SCREENING]

The hardest secrets to uncover are often the ones hidden beneath the surface.

Chile, 1992. Nine-year-old Inés spends her holidays at a hotel run by her grandparents, nestled at the foot of the snow-covered Andes. The lonely girl befriends Hanna, a young German skier whose stay suddenly ends with a mysterious disappearance. The search uncovers secrets hidden both within the guesthouse and in the memory of a country trying to leave years of dictatorship behind. “The Meltdown” is a cool, enigmatic story about coming of age, memory and what has remained repressed for years.

“Chilean director and actress Manuela Martelli’s film is as rich in layers of meaning as a blanket of snow. At the very bottom of the story lies the political thaw of the 1990s, a moment when the blessings and curses of capitalism begin to make themselves felt.”
— Ida Marszałek, Zwierciadło.pl, read the full review

“Thus, although the story is in its own way a tragedy, it remains an anti-dramatic tragedy – a tragedy of absence. It tells of a bright girl who learns, without ever receiving the cruel and misguided lesson that tribal loyalty and self-preservation should outweigh conscience when it comes to telling the truth.”
— Jessica Kiang, Variety, read the full review

“The Meltdown approaches its subject with a sceptically naive perspective, through which even the most well-meaning adults seem as though they are all involved in the same conspiracy. In a sense, perhaps they really are.”
— David Ehrlich, IndieWire, read the full review

Manuela Martelli

Chilean actress and director who began her career in front of the camera, working with filmmakers including Andrés Wood, Sebastián Lelio and Martín Rejtman. Her feature debut, “1976″ (2022), premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes and won, among other honours, the Sutherland Award at the BFI London Film Festival. In her work, Martelli often examines Chilean history through the lens of memory, silence and individual experience.

Tags: Chile, memory, mystery, coming of age

The screening is partnered by the Embassy of the Kingdom of Spain in Poland.