The Meltdown

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

It is the early 1990s in Chile. Pinochet’s regime is history, but the dictatorship’s mindset remains. At a winter sports hotel in the country’s northern mountains, a group of German skiers is training for the upcoming Olympics. The hotel is run by a married couple who are currently abroad, representing Chile at the Seville Expo, where a huge block of ice marks the country’s transition after the dictatorship. Back at the hotel, their nine-year-old daughter Ines is under her grandmother’s watchful eye.

Ines becomes friends with Hanna, a 15-year-old German girl. When Hanna mysteriously disappears into the snowy landscape around the hotel, a nerve-wracking drama begins. A major search operation is launched, but Ines has witnessed something no one else has. Fear, codes of silence and disappearances—the legacy of the Pinochet era—underpin this powerful, expertly crafted film, which makes a strong follow-up to the director’s previous film, Chile ‘76, shown at Film fra Sør in 2022.