The Meltdown

A nerve-wracking drama set at a winter hotel in Chile, in the wake of Pinochet’s fall.

It is the early 1990s in Chile. Pinochet’s regime is history, but the dictatorship’s mindset still lingers. At a ski hotel in the country’s northern mountains, a group of German skiers is training for the upcoming Olympic Games. The hotel is run by a married couple who are abroad, representing the country at the 1992 Seville Expo with a huge block of ice to mark the country’s exit from dictatorship. Back at the hotel, their nine-year-old daughter, Ines, is under her grandmother’s watch.

When Ines forms a bond with Hanna, a fifteen-year-old German girl, a nerve-wracking drama begins as Hanna mysteriously disappears into the snowy landscape around the hotel. A major search operation is launched, but Ines has seen something no one else has. Fear, codes of silence and disappearances—the legacy of the Pinochet era—lie at the heart of this powerful, finely crafted film. It follows up the director’s previous film, Chile 76, which screened at Film Fra Sør in 2022.