The Man of the Future is the very first Chilean film to be selected for the Main Competition at KVIFF. The director Felipe Ríos follows the last journey of an elderly truck driver Michelsen driving freight to the southern tip of Chilean Patagonia. It is a minimalistic film mostly shot from the truck cab, nonetheless reflecting the beauty of authentic life.
The long and arduous drive through the magnificent, luxuriant natural landscape, past lakes and extensive glaciers, ultimately becomes a recapitulation of his life when he unexpectedly happens upon his adult daughter, whom he hasn’t seen since her childhood. “The Man of the Future is a film about a father meeting his daughter, and how important yet difficult it is to forgive,” explains the director Felipe Ríos. “This is a personal theme for me as all my stories in fact somehow stem from my relationship with my father, the traumatic experience of an abandoned child. This brought me to truck drivers: they are never at home, spending their whole lives on the road. Still, they are seen as a sort of heroes in Aysén, Chile, where the film takes place: they have opened roads to towns which were mostly inaccessible by car until 1990’s.”
The director is fascinated by the job of truck drivers, who spend their days mostly shut in truck cabs. “A truck cab is a very strange place, an interior and exterior in one. While the drivers often pass through beautiful places, they rarely stop to get out and truly look around and enjoy the countryside. If you think about it, this must be a very claustrophobic life” says Ríos, who has managed to convey the claustrophobic feeling to the audience in his film.
