16/05/2026 - CANNES 2026: The director of 1976 discusses the political and interpersonal stakes in her sophomore feature

(© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it)

Actor-director Manuela Martelli returns to Cannes with her second feature, The Meltdown, screening in Un Certain Regard. It tells a coming-of-age story set in the Chilean Andes, in 1992. While Chile exhibits an iceberg piece in Seville’s Expo ‘92, a family-run ski resort becomes a microcosm for nine-year-old protagonist Inés (Maya O’Rourke), whose grandparents own the place. There, she befriends 15-year-old Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala), a German competitive skier, and their friendship defines Inés and her future. After the film’s premiere, Cineuropa sat down with the director to discuss what The Meltdown symbolises.

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Cineuropa: Inés is nine and Hanna is 15: why this particular age gap?
Manuela Martelli: I like the idea of a child looking up to a role model. And who would be a role model? Someone you want to become, who you admire, or who’s an object of desire. The two characters are both going through transitions. One is losing her childhood; the other is becoming an adult. They are close [in age], but at the same time, they are far apart [in growth]. Yet, they can still play together.

They are not as aware of their own nationalities as the audience is. Can you talk about the meeting of these countries, Chile and Germany in 1992, through those characters?
I think they have a lot in common. Both countries have a very graphic symbol, a very clear moment in each one’s history as they started to regain their democracy. In Germany, it was the fall of the Berlin Wall; in Chile, it’s the fall of dictatorship, around the same time. So, I thought that it was a good question to ask myself: what is going on? Why are these two historical events so close in time, the fall of the Wall and the regaining of democracy [in Chile]? There is a reason, and it has a lot to do with how capitalism becomes the default system for the Western world and how easily it’s embraced. We had some hope then. There was a promise that maybe it was a system that would lead to something good for everybody.

There are multiple layers of occupation in the film: Spain wants to invest in tourism, and we assume they will take away the small family business, but then, we realise the hotel was built on indigenous land and the people who used to own the land now work at reception. What do you think the viewer gains by discovering this chain-of-command ownership only gradually?
The issue of land is in the very bones of Chile, and the land we shot the film on belongs to the Mapuche community – most of it had been taken away from them. With the movie, I also wanted to track where the hotel land would have come from, so it seemed very possible that it was previously owned by the people who now work at the hotel. And with investments from Europe, what changes would be made in terms of structure, society and landscape? For whose benefit?

What does it mean to be able to shoot a film on these lands today?
The distribution of land and the people who disappeared [during the dictatorship] are things we don’t talk about enough. We owe them so much [attention], and yet, there's so much silence around them. I think we don't want to face up to it, so it’s even more important to start setting up stories on these lands, told from different points of view.

Inés is observant and very curious, but she’s too young to bear the responsibility of what she sees. But it seems like maybe when she grows up, she might be one of those people who would not stay silent.
Exactly. This is the hopeful part of the film, I think: that Inés would transform her experience into action afterwards. We have hope for her as well, to achieve some justice for herself and to also do justice to memory.

Why was it important to surround the protagonist with a community of women?
As a woman, it just comes intuitively to portray what I love about the world I know. It’s a way to understand myself and other women better. To paint portraits of us women, so that we can have a mirror of what we are. Also, there's a lack of deep female characters in cinema, as the difference between very complex male characters and women is still so big. I see it as a debt we owe to women.