Chilean actor Alfredo Castro (“The Club,” “Tony Manero”) will make his directorial debut with the psychological thriller “Los Trabajadores de la Muerte,” which translates to “the workers of death.”
based on Diamela Eltit’s novel of the same title, the film is penned by Castro and Pablo Valledor. Chile’s Storyboard Media and Les Films de l’Âge d’Or in France co-produce.
Set during Chile’s economic crisis of the early 1980s under brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, the film follows Patricio, a career criminal constantly surrounded by drugs, alcohol, women and scams. Exhausted by her son’s illicit activities, Patricio’s mother goes into self-exile and begs the boy to travel to Chile’s south to reform himself. There, he falls in love with Monica, a young woman with dark secrets of her own.
In addition to writing and directing, Castro will act in the film alongside Amparo Noguera (“A Fantastic Woman”), Millaray Lobos (“Some Beasts”) and newcomer Matilde Stuardo.
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Castro toldPvNewthat his adaptation aimed in part to “capture the alluring universe proposed by Eltit’s novel: the aesthetics of the suburbs and the clandestine, the marginal soda fountains, popular bars, the nocturnal aesthetics, the characters of the Santiago underworld and the street.”
Castro is an esteemed theater teacher and influence on director Pablo Larrain, in whose early films he starred.
