With a long-running Festival like ours, it is inevitable that you will run into some familiar faces and names. Many Latin American, Spanish, Portuguese and U.S. Latino filmmakers have trusted their first, second and third films with us with the knowledge that they will find the right audience. They have become more than alums of the Chicago Latino Film Festival; they are also our friends. It always thrills us when we find out that they are working on a new film.
One of those friends is Ecuadorian filmmaker Sebastián Cordero. Born in Ecuador, Sebastián spent his childhood in Quito and his teenage years in Paris where he fell in love with the movies. He studied screenwriting at the University of South California in Los Angeles and returned to Ecuador in 1995 with the idea of making a feature film in a country with an almost non-existent film industry. His first film, Ratas, ratones, rateros was an Official Selection at the Venice Film Festival in 1999 where it started its worldwide tour of over 50 festivals. His next film, Crónicas, starring John Leguizamo, won the NHK International Filmmakers Award at Sundance and premiered at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section in 2004. Produced by Guillermo del Toro, Sebastián’s next film, Rabia, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in late 2009 and won for Best Film, Photography and Supporting Actor at Malaga Film Festival. He made his English-language debut with the science-fiction film Europa Report (2013) which was released in the United States by Magnet Releasing, the genre arm of Magnolia Pictures.
Sebastián makes his debut as a documentary filmmaker with Al otro lado de la niebla (Behind the Mist). In it, he is invited by Iván Vallejo, the first Ecuadorian to climb to the summit of Mount Everest in 1999, to make a film that would commemorate his trajectory. Together, they travel to Nepal, where Iván shares his own life experiences and Sebastián begins to come to terms with his own legacy and future. Stunningly shot by Sebastián himself, Al otro lado de la niebla is a film that invites us to look within ourselves and to take a deep breath and appreciate our surroundings.
We spoke to Sebastián about his move to documentary filmmaking:
We’ve featured a good number of your films at the Festival. How would you describe your relationship to it?
I have a lot of love and respect for the Chicago Latino Film Festival. I presented my first feature, Ratas ratones rateros, there 25 years ago and I was taken by surprise by the great work Pepe Vargas and his team did in reaching out to Chicago’s Latino audiences, creating, truly, a parallel cultural space where our identity could be shared with my fellow Ecuadorians (or anyone from any Latin American country really), with a surprising reach to the public of migrant origin. I’ve attended many festivals that aspire to reach a specific niche and are not successful. The Chicago Latino Film Festival has a surprising reach, thanks to its grassroots efforts, and is able to connect Latin American cinema to the Spanish-speaking communities. This may seem obvious but it is still one of the greatest and most difficult challenges in the United States.
Except for Europa Report, your one and only science-fiction film, the thriller has dominated your filmography. With Al otro lado de la niebla (Behind the Mist), you jump to the other side, to the documentary form, when it is usually the other way around (documentary filmmakers making their transition to fiction features). Why did you want to make a documentary at this stage of your life?
I have dedicated these past few years to exploring several different paths to the creative process. I first started with theater, adapting my own film Rabia into an immersive experience. I wanted to be able to see the audience from different perspectives and also explore new ways of telling the story. Parallel to this exploration, I began to feel the need to tell more personal stories and the documentary has allowed me to do that. In the case of Al otro lado de la niebla (Behind the Mist), the personal element grew in a very organic way, without the film having been planned that way, and it is that personal element that I like the most about it. I am currently editing a documentary that is even more personal. I keep exploring, it’s part of my growth as an artist.
At the beginning of the documentary, you acknowledge that when Iván Vallejo invited you to shoot it, you had no clear idea how you would finish it or even what shape it would take. How were those initial shooting days like for you? Were you joined by any additional crew members or were you a one-man band? And when did you finally come up with its structure?
It was only me, Iván and our guide during the shoot. I had a small camera, two lenses, the lightest tripod I could find and a digital recorder. Everything fit in a backpack. So, yes, I was a one man band. At the beginning we thought we would split the shoot in two parts: one part in Nepal and the other in China. But the pandemic forced us to change our plans, so we canceled our second trip.
What was interesting is that I felt that that first trip would be part of the process of prior research and that I would be using very little of that material, so I felt free to shoot whatever I wanted and capture anything that caught my eye. Later, as I began to edit the film, I felt grateful for having taken that spontaneous approach. When the second part of the trip was cancelled, I thought that I no longer had a documentary but it was during the pandemic shutdown that I found the structure which focused as much on myself as on Iván.
Has Iván seen the documentary? What did he make of it?
Iván loves the documentary, but I was really afraid of showing it to him the first time because I felt that maybe it would not meet his expectations. But he loved the fact, that it was so personal, so questioning, and that it shows both of us as characters who are philosophical antagonists that learn how to share the beauty of life.
What are you working on at the moment?
I am finishing that documentary I told you before, and I hope to begin shooting my new fiction feature in early 2026, a project that I’ve been dreaming to do since I was a teen,
Al otro lado de la niebla will screen alongside the Brazilian short Pastrana directed by Gabriel Motta on Wednesday, April 9th at 5:45 p.m. and Saturday, April 12, 8:45 p.m. at the Landmark Century Center Theatres.
