Virgilio (Vee) Bravo ’95 was still in bed on October 20, 2019, when he started scrolling through news headlines on his phone.
What he saw woke him up.
In Chile, high school students occupied a subway station in Santiago, protesting a fare increase. The situation took a dark turn when they were met by the Chilean army, sent by the president and armed with rubber bullets. However, some 30 people died in the months of violence that followed, and thousands were injured and arrested.
A continent away, Bravo sprung into action, assembling a team of filmmakers and producers. Within three weeks, they were on the ground in the conflict-torn city, creating an indelible record of events: a meaningful act in a country that had spent the 70s and 80s under the influence of a military dictatorship. Censorship was a reality in those days, covering up the brutality of Augusto Pinochet’s regime; Bravo and his team were determined to prevent this from happening again.
“I felt compelled. I’ve done all this work in New York, working with communities of color, communities that I identify with. How can I not respond to what is happening in my country?” recalled the producer, director and Harpur College alumnus.
The end result is a feature-length documentary, First. Directing and producing the project, Bravo is joined by producers Catherine Gund and Kevin Lopez and editor Elisa Correa on the project.
Shot over the course of a year, First it shows the birth of a nationwide movement that began with a student takeover of Santiago’s subway system and culminated in a referendum demanding a new constitution. At the center of the story are ordinary people, and especially women, whose daily lives bear the scars of violent police repression.
Screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2021, the film was produced in record time – just 14 months from shooting to editing – and during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Now available to stream on HBO Max and Warner Bros. DiscoveryOneFifty.
“It was an opportunity for Chile to reimagine itself. How many generations have this opportunity?” Bravo said.
A love of storytelling
Fleeing the dictatorship, Bravo’s family settled in New York in 1981, when he was about 7 years old. Growing up, he developed a deep interest in storytelling, first fueled by books and later documentaries on subjects such as the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement.
“I always appreciated the way those filmmakers combined the content and the music of the time,” he said.
Part of the Educational Opportunity Program during his time at Binghamton University, Bravo majored in political science and Latin American and Caribbean area studies (LACAS). It was the first time he had the opportunity to study the history of the homeland, he said; his mentors included the late Professor of Comparative Literature María Lugones and sociology professor Kelvin Santiago-Valles, who introduced him to concepts such as intersectionality and power dynamics.
He was active on campus, writing for the student newspaper and participating in the Latin American Student Union. During his senior year at Binghamton, he was already working to create an independent hip-hop culture magazine with fellow students from Binghamton, New York University, and other universities in the tri-state area. That project evolved into Stress magazine and a 25-year career documenting hip-hop, youth culture and politics.
After earning a master’s degree in urban policy at the New School, he moved into education and film. In 2009, he co-produced with Loira Limbal the PBS documentary hip hop style, on the rise of hip-hop activism in Latin America; that same year, he was hired by the late Albert Maysles to open the Education Department at the Maysles Documentary Center. He served as vice president of education for the Tribeca Film Institute from 2011 to 2018, where he led filmmaking and social impact programs that reached more than 30,000 people in public schools and prisons across the United States.
“I began to understand that influence is critical. You can do great work, but not everyone is going to go to museums or tune in to PBS,” he said. “So how do you bring your work to the communities that are directly affected by it?”
Making ‘Primera’
Bravo and his team arrived in Chile the first week of November 2019 and began documenting everything they saw. Upon their return to the US in January, they reviewed their footage and realized they had created a film about a critical and evolving moment in Latin American history. Little did they know then that the ongoing protests would evolve into calls for a new constitution, empowered by ordinary people, he said.
They returned to Chile that February. Another guest was also on the way: COVID-19.
“I got on the last flight out of Chile before the US closed the borders,” Bravo said.
Filming continued during the pandemic, thanks to a team of Chilean filmmakers.
First follows the lives of four individuals. Angie, a single mother, pastry chef and folk singer, became involved in the uprising after Camila, a fellow musician and street artist, was shot and detained by the police without medical attention. Felipe, a welder, witnessed the military attack on protesting students while picking up his daughter from school; he was encouraged to build barricades and shields to protect peaceful demonstrators. Male, a human rights lawyer, and her firm took on the cases of demonstrators who experienced police violence, including Camila and Felipe.
Ultimately, the movement led to a referendum on whether the country should write a new constitution; was overwhelmingly approved, where the film ends. At present, however, the way forward is uncertain; Chilean voters rejected a proposed new constitution this September, and the old constitution remains in place.
However, the Chilean experience offers some lessons for American viewers. If we want a society free from institutional racism and violence against women and girls, an inclusive society that respects diversity, we must look to the document that creates social order: the constitution, Bravo said.
“The Chilean people want the same things: equality, equity, rights, dignity. People want to go to hospital and be treated with dignity; people want health and education to be basic rights for all,” he said. “Instead of focusing on reforms and policy changes, they realized that the constitution keeps the 1% in power.”
“What if we scrapped the Bill of Rights and rewrote it to include the diversity of people who make up this country now?” he asked. “We hope that people can use the example of Chile and start focusing on some of the documents that are essential to achieving structural change.”
