Chile went through political turmoil in the 1970s when Augusto Pinochet became their president. With the Pinochet regime already in power and ending civilian rule in 1984, UFOs were hovering above the sky. One day, radio jockeys Cristina Carvelli, Daniel Morales, Cristina Muñoz, and her spouse Octavio Ortiz receive a message from a sailor named Hector. He informs them from his dispatch at the Mitahues Lighthouse that “a big fireball” has landed at the mysterious, human-inhabited Friendship (an island in Los Chonos Archipelago) and is approaching them.
This synopsis from Cristóbal Valenzuela Berríos’ film Alien Island already feels like an episode from The Twilight Zone or an anthology entry written by Phillip K. Dick, but these events happened. To elicit the genre’s tropes and revere the so-called conspiracists, Berríos and cinematographer Mattías Illanes shot it in black-and-white, suggesting classics à la The Manchurian Candidate (1962) or The Battle of Chile (1973). These elaborated designs are accompanied by archival footage of onlookers looking up and investigating their surroundings to observe the high interest in social phenomena and recreations where younger actors embody the interviewees’ testimonials.
Later in the journey, the collective got a call from ufologist Ernesto de la Fuente Gandarillas, of Taiquemo station, about the presence of human-like aliens at Friendship and how they gave a remedy to his lung cancer. When Berríos explores the many details in the life of the ex-heavy-smoker and his affiliation with Friendship, he quietly removes the collective’s efforts in finding the saucer. In addition to his Ufology studies, Gandarillas was a mechanical engineer who worked in films as a sound recordist and performer. (His notable credits were Raul Ruiz’s The Penal Colony [1970] and ¡Que Hacer! [1972].) Though Ortiz claimed that Gandarillas was “secretive” and a man of very few words, there is a lot of material in Gandarillas’ life that could have been in the film itself, as shown through the in-sync pairings between his performances and his soundbite that advance the narrative.
Berríos unintentionally diverts the political thriller into a mini-biopic of Gandarillas, disrupting the initial sci-fi plot of seeking peace and truth. But Berríos reignites that fire when he unveils Gandarillas’ ties with Pinochet and involvement in the 1973 disappearance of Carlos Maldonado. Berríos implies how the enigmatic terrain and Gandarillas’ expanded life expectancy correlate with one’s stance on Pinochet. For those who appear to be against Pinochet’s dictatorship, in this case, the administration will punish them. It is an impressionistic, visual inquiry of how information emerges from the shadows and the scientifically advanced gets politicized. Conspiracies get proven, myth forms into evidence.
Alien Island is a midnight documentary that examines the development of a liking. We thank Berríos and company for capturing the testimonies of Maldonado’s daughter Maria, Gandarillas, and the ufologists to clear the air of this largely unknown chapter in Chile’s history. Though this could have been seen as a true-crime drama, Berríos implements frisky homages to the science-themed genre that give lungs to the obscured, multifaceted friendship.
Alien Island played at the 2024 True/False Film Festival.
Grade: B-
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