Are you ready for something a bit different, Outposters? How about famous historical figures as undead bloodsuckers? El Conde (translated as The Count) is an upcoming Chilean comedy that is blacker than black.
It is directed by Pablo Larraín and written by Larraín and Guillermo Calderón. It stars Jaime Vadell, Gloria Münchmeyer, Alfredo Castro, and Paula Luchsinger. The film features a 250-year-old vampire Augusto Pinochet seeking death. In this movie, Pinochet never died. Instead, as a vampire who is 250 years old, he decides he wants to die due to his complicated family situation and the dishonor of his family name.
In real life, Augusto Pinochet studied geopolitics, military geography, and military intelligence. After being appointed Supreme Commander of all of Chile’s armed forces and their national police, he became leader after a September 11, 1973 coup and seized power from President Salvador Allende.
In his memoirs, Pinochet said that he was the leading plotter of the coup and had used his position as commander-in-chief of the Army to coordinate a far-reaching scheme with the other two branches of the military and the national police. Others dispute this and say he was a reluctant member of the parties behind the coup and only went along with it when it became clear it would happen without him.
What is true is that he enacted far-reaching free-market reforms that were seen in the West as instrumental in pushing back against creeping socialism across Latin America. He took a zero-tolerance, hard-line approach towards communists, often inviting them to take helicopter trips that seriously violated their human rights.
Intelligence agencies under Pinochet’s regime instituted secret detention and torture sites to conduct political repression. In total, Chile had 17 torture centers. The dictator eventually died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 91 in 2006.
El Conde is set to premiere at the 80th Venice International Film Festival in September 2023, and is scheduled to be premiered sometime in 2023 on Netflix.
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