During the summer of 1990 in Chile, a small group of families lives in an isolated community right below the Andes, building a new world away from the urban excesses, with the emerging freedom that followed the recent end of the dictatorship. In this time of change and reckoning, 16-year-old Sofía and Lucas, and 10-year-old Clara, neighbours in this dry land, struggle with parents, first loves, and fears, as they prepare a big party for New Year’s Eve. They may live far from the dangers of the city, but not from those of nature.

Dominga Sotomayor Castillo, director and writer of the film, shows the powerful coming of age stories of two teenagers and one kid; evoking a fourth coming of age; a new Chile. The director shows great talent by building a groundbreaking “Mise-en-scène” which delivers a film with a heightened sensory experience: one can almost embrace and smell the sultry days of summer. Once William Faulkner wrote in “Light in August”: “Memory believes before knowing remembers”. Tarde Para Morir Joven is about this. Sotomayor makes a poetic movie that is a statement about nostalgia. Using a contemplative, delicate and sensitive gaze, the filmmaker create a series of scenes that seem like postcards from a bucolic past–a past that would never come back, a past that believes before knowing.

(Daniel Sanchez Lopez, Visionär Filmfestival)