Too Late to Die Young

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

About the Director

Dominga Sotomayor studied Audiovisual Directing at Universidad Católica de Chile, and a Masters in Directing at ESCAC in Barcelona. She developed her first feature Thursday till Sunday at the Cannes Cinéfondation Residence. The film won the Tiger Award in Rotterdam in 2012 and was screened in more than a hundred festivals. In 2013 she codirected The Island, that also won the Tiger. In 2015 she premiered her mid-length Mar at Berlinale Forum, and the collective film Here in Lisbon produced by Indielisboa. She has worked in videos and photographs for visual art exhibitions, like Little Sun (Olafur Eliasson, 2012) at the Tate Modern in London. In 2009 she co-founded Cinestación, a leading production company based in Santiago where she produces auteur filmmaking in Latin-America. Recently, she has been involved in Los Fuertes, by Omar Zúñiga (in post production), Murder me, Monster, by Alejandro Fadel, premiered at Un certain Regard in Cannes 2018, and Raging Helmets, by Neto Villalobos. She also co-founded CCC, Centro de Cine y Creación, a cultural centre and arthouse cinema scheduled to open in Santiago de Chile in 2019.