Frontera, el mundo con otros ojos
2023 · 23m · Chile
Directed by Bernardita Ojeda., Cristián Freire
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
Ayelen, a Mapuche girl from the Nahuelbuta area, and Francesco, an Italian boy who has just arrived with his family to live on the other side of the river, build a beautiful, genuine friendship despite their cultural differences — a friendship endangered by the prejudices of the adults, which will take Ayelen on a deep journey through the forest and its secrets.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a cross-cultural friendship story to sand down its edges and teach us all to get along—Frontera does the opposite, letting the forest itself become a character that validates Ayelen's world instead of asking her to validate ours, which is genuinely subversive in ways the premise doesn't advertise.
The film sits in deliberate conversation with both magical realism as a Latin American tradition and the European coming-of-age form, using the river as a formal boundary that the editing and sound design refuse to let us forget—it's aware of what it's inheriting and complicates it.
The choice to make the forest's mythic register feel documentary-true, not fantastical—to trust that Mapuche cosmology doesn't need special effects to be real on screen—is the decision that elevates what could've been a well-meaning indie drama into something with actual metaphysical weight.