Rey
Experimental film about a slightly crazed French lawyer-adventurer in nineteenth-century Chile.
REY recounts a fragmented and delusional chronology, loosely based on the historical figure Orllie-Antoine de Tounens, a French lawyer who crossed into southern Chile in the 1860s and claims to have been elected ‘King of Araucania and Patagonia’ by the indigenous population of that region. The adventure of this King ends with his prison sentence and subsequent confinement in the Psychiatric Hospital in Santiago, Chile. The film leads us through a stream-of-consciousness collage of memories, dreams and hallucinations that depict Orllie-Antoine’s captivity in prison, his crossing into uncharted regions of Patagonia and his contact with the indigenous Mapuche population. The film draws a parallel between Orllie-Antoine’s romantic vision of exploring the ‘wild’ and ‘undiscovered’ territory of Patagonia and the exoticism in filmic representations of ‘far off lands’ and ‘savages’ in the documentaries and westerns of early cinema.