The Movie Teller

María Margarita, a young woman who lives in a mining town in the heart of the Chilean Atacama desert in the 1960s, has had the gift of telling movies since she was a child. When a film starring Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper or Charlton Heston, or a Mexican feature packed with songs, arrives in the local village cinema, the exact change for a ticket is collected at María’s house and she is sent to watch it. When María returns from the cinema, she tells the movie to her father, confined to a wheelchair, and to her four siblings, and soon she is telling the movie to a large and impatient public. Through this tender story, Hernán Rivera Letelier gives us the magical tale of village cinemas in their times of splendor – and of decadence. Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa