‘Esa inmensa cantidad de grises:’ An Interview with Juan Pablo Sallato

Between doing the right thing and the wrong thing there is “an immensity of grey tones” – this is how Chilean director Juan Pablo Sallato describes the moral dilemma faced by the protagonist of his feature debut, Hangar Rojo (Red Hangar), which premiered in the Perspectives sidebar at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. That protagonist is Captain Jorge Silva, a figure based on a former head of Counterintelligence in the Air Force in Chile who was known across the country for having jumped from a plane to land in the middle of the Estadio Nacional. This beloved soccer stadium became a torture and detention centre in the early days of the Pinochet coup. Indeed, Red Hangar is set on the eve of September 11, 1973, when the military bombed La Moneda, the seat of the government, and deposed President Salvador Allende. 

When the film begins, we see Captain Jorge Silva (Nicolás Zárate) instructing a gauche new sergeant, Hernández. Things become more intense when a truck carrying unidentified cargo arrives at the base and the general in the truck barks orders at Silva to let it pass. Clearly, something is afoot. The taut black-and-white film will cover the following 24 hours, condensing one of the most ignominious events in Latin American history into a drama that unfolds over some 80 minutes. At the centre is Zárate’s magnificent performance as Jorge Silva that shows him as an elusive, hard-to-read leader who has to decide whether to obey orders or follow his conscience. When his superiors try to gauge his political position, Silva consistently replies that his duty as a professional military man is to follow orders – not to think. Throughout the film he thus remains a cypher to everyone around him as well as the audience. As we repeatedly witness, between doing the right thing and the wrong thing, there is a sea of grey. This is the zone that fascinated director Sallato and which Red Hangar explores.

Red Hangar

There have been numerous documentaries and feature films about the decades starting in the mid 1970s, when the United States supported military dictatorships across Latin America and particularly in the Southern Cone to fight various allegedly Soviet-inspired leftist movements. The real aim of these so-called dirty wars, however, was to institute neoliberal regimes, as Naomi Klein, among many others, argues.¹ Under the code name “Plan Condor” state terror and repression involved the assassination of political leaders, clergy, union organisers, and activist students. Thousands were tortured and disappeared. In Chile alone, more than 3,000 people were killed and up to 40,000 tortured during Pinochet’s 17-year rule. 

An early account of the terror of those years in Chile is Patricio Guzmán’s magisterial three-part documentary La Batalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile, 1975). For international audiences, Costa-Gavra’s Missing (1982) will be a reference. Produced by Universal, it caused considerable controversy in Chile and was banned under Pinochet. In Argentina the Academy-award winning feature La Historia Oficial (The Official Story, Luis Puenzo, 1985) as well as La Noche de los Lápices (The Night of the Pencils, Hector Olivera, 1986), among many others, are examples of this turn to memory and testimony in the aftermath of state terror. In recent years, there has been another impressive wave of very diverse films, including Argentina, 1985 (Santiago Mitre, 2022), featuring Ricardo Darín as charismatic leader of the prosecution against former leaders of Argentina’s military junta and, as a companion piece of sorts, Ulises de la Orden’s El Juicio (The Trial, 2023). This three-hour documentary chronicles the court proceedings against former Argentinean President Videla and eight members of his military junta, who in 1985 were put on trial on charges that included unlawful detention, torture and murder. Drawing on 530 hours of television coverage, the film documents the first true test of a young democracy that ended with convictions for five of the accused. Last year’s Brazilian Academy Award winner, Ainda estou aqui (I’m Still Here), by Walter Salles, about a political dissident disappeared during the dictatorship, rounds out the picture. Given this impressive body of works, one may well wonder what Red Hangar has to contribute to a topic that has been so amply covered. The answer is: a lot.

In fact, Red Hangar tells the hidden story of the imprisonment, torture, and disappearances that took place within the military during those years. What is little known and perhaps especially shocking is the torture of superiors by their (former) subordinates. In contrast to the films mentioned above, which assume the point of view of the victims, Sallato’s film makes us witness the events through the eyes of a mid-ranking Air Force officer who is ordered to support the coup against Allende, to interrogate and torture opponents, and who in turn ends up along with them being tortured for having disobeyed orders. 

Red Hangar

By compressing the film into roughly 24 hours, Red Hangar creates “a pressure cooker scenario,” as actor Nicolás Zárate calls it in our interview, in which Captain Silva has to make life and death decisions at breakneck speed. The setting is mostly confined to the air base, which is turned into a detention and torture centre, with the film’s title referencing the hangar dedicated for leftist prisoners. Red Hangar thus achieves an almost Aristotelian unity of time, place and action. A signature shot of DOP, Diego Pequeño, repeatedly shows us the back of Silva’s head. We see what he sees but are not privy to his thoughts. The limited range of Silva’s mostly well-guarded emotions unfolds through his interactions with Hernández, with whom he slowly builds trust; his tender but not entirely honest moments with his wife, Rosa, a history teacher at the university; and his poker-face vis-à-vis his superior, the hardline Colonel Jahn, with whom he shares a past that is slowly revealed (and which Sallato addresses in the interview). In these exchanges, more important than what is said is what is self-understood and what doesn’t need to be said. 

Full credit for the intense, tension-filled storyline goes to Luis Emilio Guzmán, who wrote the script for Red Hangar, based on Fernando Villagrán’s eye-witness account and extensive research into the Air Force’s role in the coup, Disparen a la bandada: Una crónica secreta de la FACH (which translates as “Shoot at the Flock: A Secret Chronicle of the Chilean Air Force”). The book was first published in 2002 and is based on Villagrán’s imprisonment and torture. A revised and much expanded edition that included the stories of Silva and other officers in the Air Force who did not support the coup d’etat in Chile was published in 2013, marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Allende.² 

The backstory to both book and script is fascinating. Like most memory work and chronicles of state terror, it is a story of profound, generous, and sometimes unlikely friendships and collaborative work over more than a decade. In the book, Villagrán describes his own experiences as a 24-year-old student activist in the MAPU (Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitaria), because of which he and his friend were imprisoned and tortured. This leftist political party was part of the coalition that Allende built, and which was repressed under Pinochet. In the film and in real life, Villagrán, together with his comrade Felipe Agüero, were interrogated by Captain Silva on the Air Force base at the detention centre called the Red Hangar. When Silva was ordered to kill them while en route to the National Stadium, he defied the order and delivered them there. He thereby saved their lives, even if they would continue to be tortured at the National Stadium. Ironically, because of his disobedience, Silva would end up there with them as well. 28 years later, thanks to a series of circumstances, theirs would become an unlikely yet profound friendship and they would collaborate on the making of the film.³

The following interview with director Juan Pablo Sallato and actor Nicolás Zárate was recorded in Spanish on February 14, 2026, during the Berlin Film Festival.

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Red Hangar

At the Q&A following the Berlinale premiere, you and Fernando Villagrán, as well as most of your team were up on stage. You were obviously moved and Fernando was teary eyed. Why was this such an emotional moment?

Juan Pablo Sallato: For me it was very emotional that Fernando was at the premiere, because of all the years we have worked together on this project, and all the years he worked with Luis Emilio Guzmán revising and rewriting the script. But also because of the profound friendship that had ensued between Captain Jorge Silva and him. And because of what this story means to him. Captain Jorge Silva, who had advised us on military protocols and other such important details, had sadly passed on the very same day that we received the funding to make the film. This screening at the Berlinale was the first time I met Barbara, Silva’s daughter. But the whole story is much longer and it’s an incredible story.

Red Hangar is a project that seems to have been driven by many coincidences, and it has involved all of you in many different ways, and over many years. How did it all start? 

Juan Pablo Sallato: It all started with Fernando, who had the courage not only to oppose the military takeover but also to do the research into Captain Jorge Silva and other members of the Chilean Armed Forces (FACH). This is a story that literally no one knows. While the military is usually portrayed as presenting a unified front against Allende, there was in fact a deep division between those who orchestrated the coup and those who opposed it. Felipe Agüero, who had been a student activist at the MAPU with Fernando and who had been tortured and imprisoned along with Fernando, went into exile in the United States and ended up as a professor of sociology in Miami. (His twin brother Ignacio Agüero is a very famous Chilean documentary filmmaker, whose film Cien niños esperando un tren, 1988 is perhaps the best chronicle of the dictatorship years). Many years later, in 1994, when Chile was a democracy again, he returned to Chile to give a talk at the Catholic University. And Felipe recognised the big shot academic in the Political Science department who was moderating the event as one of the torturers at the Estadio Nacional.

And what happened after that?

Juan Pablo Sallato: After that, Felipe publicly outed him in the well-known Revista Caras. This was the first funa, a post-Pinochet style of public outing of former torturers. And the journal in which Felipe’s charge was published reached Jorge Silva in his exile in London. When Jorge read that newspaper article it brought back memories. He had actually forgotten Fernando and Felipe’s names, but he knew he had been one of the officers who had interrogated them. But they did not know that he had also saved them from being summarily executed. They did not know his role in the story. Moved, Silva wrote Felipe Agüero a letter. “Hey guys, you were students, and you will not remember, but you were full of revolutionary fever and – especially Fernando – disrespected me, and you didn’t realize the great danger you were in.” So, when Silva returned to Chile, he looked up Fernando and Felipe and they started to talk, and a great friendship developed. That friendship led Fernando to research more fully the role of the other Air Force members who, like Jorge Silva, had opposed the coup. Without his friendship with Jorge, the book would not have been written, and the film obviously would not have been made. 

How did you hear about the project and why did it interest you to work on this material?

Juan Pablo Sallato: Fernando always wanted to make a film about all this. He had known Luis Emilio since he was a baby, and he admired him as a talented scriptwriter and wanted him to write the script. They worked together on the screenplay for a long time, almost 15 years. Then they started searching for a director. And then Emilio, whom I knew, brought me the project. 

In the Q&A after the premiere Nicolás said that acting in that film felt like being in a pressure cooker. Where did this idea to create very tight, tense scenes, come from – was that in the script or did you bring that to the project?

Juan Pablo Sallato: The idea of the pressure cooker came from the script. From what I have told you so far, you can get a sense of how complex the whole story is. In the process of developing it further, we went through about 20 different versions. That is the macro story – it goes back much further, and there are many characters involved. And Fernando’s book is like that as well. 

The story is told through a lot of close-ups. Overall, there is a lot of restraint. Silva is often shown from the back, with a hand-held camera, as if he were in the crosshairs of a rifle. 

Juan Pablo Sallato: I always felt that this film had to be about the split moment of decision. We wanted Jorge’s character to be in a situation where he constantly had to make decisions, without any time to reflect. He had to be constantly under pressure. 

The lead-up to the coup is told mainly through gripping scenes and visuals, as for example when Hernández throws up after he sees a man shot in the back, and a shot being fired right next to the ear of a cadet as punishment for not immediately shooting a fleeing prisoner. These are scenes rarely seen in films like this.

Juan Pablo Sallato: Films have the power to create or convey memory in ways that facts or data do not. Yes, the film is a pronounced exercise in creating a subjective point of view. We tried to maintain that subjectivity as we dug deeper into the character. 

You do not directly show scenes of torture. You did not show how Fernando and Felipe were tortured. In fact, it feels as if you studiously avoided filming scenes of torture.

Yes. When we were editing the script, we were intent on evoking horror without being graphic. The horror happens in the room next door – you hear it, but you don’t see it, which makes it worse. We did not want to make torture porn. That has been done and we were tired of that. We did not want to subject viewers to that.

The deep division within the military is literally unknown and perhaps even actively suppressed in Chile. But you show two opposing groups: the generals intent on the coup, and those who like Jorge Silva believe their duty is to uphold the Constitution and thus protect Allende. 

Juan Pablo Sallato: Yes, on one side is the military and on the other side is Jorge Silva’s conscience. I wanted to insert some humanity and complexity into the most horrible moments in Chilean history. It had to be about urgency. 

Red Hangar is premiering at a moment in Chilean history which is highly reminiscent of the Pinochet years. The clock is being turned back, memory is being actively suppressed. What did you aim to achieve with this film? 

Juan Pablo Sallato: It had to interpolate the spectator. They should ask themselves, ‘What if I were that 18-year-old soldier from the provinces in the south of Chile and the general tells me I have to really hurt someone, and if not, I would face the consequences – what would I do?’ The film is about that – about understanding the urgency of the moment. It’s about the period between the evening of September 10, when the final details of the coup were being planned, and the day of the actual coup, on September 11. And it is about the immensity of grey areas. 

Jorge Silva is hard to read in the film. He remains a cypher until the very end. He is very detached and formal, yet we see also him show tenderness at certain moments. We do not really know where he stands or where his sympathies lie. When cornered by Colonel Jahn and others about his political stance, he repeatedly replies that his job is not to think but to obey. For you, was Silva in the end a hero?

Juan Pablo Sallato: When we talk about Silva’s heroic gesture, we have to put the term in quotation marks, because even though he made the ethical decision to save Felipe and Fernando from certain death, his range of action is limited and he still leaves them in the National Stadium, which was a centre of torture. But it was better than having them summarily executed, as Colonel Jahn had ordered. So, we’re not talking about a hero like Steve McQueen, but during a time of extreme violence it’s still the correct ethical thing.

From the beginning of the film, we can see his ambiguity. Captain Silva’s first failure is to let the truck onto the base, even though he knows or at least suspects what this means.

Juan Pablo Sallato: Yes, and that is because there’s a backstory between Silva and Jahn, who is in the truck, which only gets revealed later in the film. Colonel had been one of the military leaders who plotted to assassinate president-elect Allende on his way to Valparaiso, where he had to approve the congress. The plan was to kill him while en route, before he could be sworn in. The people planning the assassination called in Captain Jorge Silva, because he was a respected officer in Counter-Intelligence, and he had been a stellar student at the School of the Americas where the top right-wing military leaders were trained in torture and counter insurgency by the US military. Silva had studied there with General Sergio Arellano Stark, who later commanded the so-called caravana de la muerte (the caravan of death), which between September and October 1973 killed an estimated 97 people who were all summarily executed. When Jahn had approached him a few years earlier about participating in the assassination, Jorge Silva decided to uphold the Constitution and met with Allende. As a consequence, the assassination attempt was thwarted and Jahn went into exile. Silva in turn was punished by not being promoted and instead assigned the position of training young recruits at the airbase. That tells you something about the power structure in the Air Force.

Why did Colonel Jahn not kill Silva? 

Juan Pablo Sallato: Because he enjoyed psychologically torturing him. At the end of the day, the film is about conflict among men and their weaknesses, their mistakes, and their clumsiness. 

Jorge Silva was really tortured, correct?

Juan Pablo Sallato: As a Counter-Intelligence officer, Silva had been trained to withstand torture, and he was tortured far more than others. Silva outlasted torture longer than Bachelet. 

Bachelet of course was a general in the army who did not support the coup and who died after a 30-hour session of torture.

Yes, he is the father of Michelle Bachelet who was also tortured and who later was twice elected as President. Her father was brought into the cell where Silva was, and Silva tried to help him. But Bachelet, who had had heart problems, had a heart attack and literally died in Silva’s arms. 

For those of us not living in Chile, Patricio Guzman’s films like the trilogy The Battle of Chile (1972-1975) are an immediate reference of those years. Was he an influence or is your generation of filmmakers resisting his aesthetic and perhaps agonistic narrative? 

Juan Pablo Sallato: I am a great admirer of Patricio Guzmán. He has been a great inspiration to all the filmmakers in Chile. And so has his director of photography, Jorge Müller Silva. The way Patricio Guzmán filmed The Battle of Chile was key for us.

Why did you decide to film in black-and-white?

Juan Pablo Sallato: There is a passage in the book where Fernando recalls that he went to La Moneda on September 11, because he wanted to see whether it had really been bombed. And when he saw the burning palace, if I remember correctly, he said something like, ‘I saw the world in black and white.’ When I read that I thought that the film should also be in black-and-white. 

Why did you decide to focus on Captain Silva and not one of his superiors?

The film is not about the people at the top but those who are in the middle tier. It’s a world in which rank is acquired by obeying blindly. Before Pinochet, the military were respected; it was considered an honourable profession in Chile. Jorge Silva was a military man through and through. I respect that kind of professionalism. Silva was not a revolutionary or a leftist sympathiser. That’s what makes him such an interesting character. He is full of grey zones. 

We wanted to humanise a world which generally does not transmit humanity. We wanted to tell the story from the point of view of someone whose power to decide is smaller, but where the moral conflict is bigger.

Even though the film is in black-and -white it plays with nuances of grey – in fact, the grey scale predominates.

Juan Pablo Sallato: My background is in art and painting. And I was interested in the grey zones in a world that is normally thought of as mainly black and white. The spectrum of grey was how I was thinking of the characters we were describing – the grey zones in a very complicated political context. In fact, it’s actually a good thing that it took us so long to make this film, because we only slowly began to fully grasp how complex the situation had been in 1973. During those years I matured. Today, I’m much more interested in raising questions than supplying answers. There are also great doubts – why are we so violent? Why do we commit the same mistakes, over and over again? Why do we do such horrible things? What happens to memory when a political leader comes in who wants to rewrite the past or simply forget it? 

Photo of Captain Jorge Silva landing in the National Stadium

Captain Jorge Silva was an admired parachutist famous for having landed in the middle of the National Stadium. The camera often zooms in on the figure of a toy parachutist that dangles from Silva’s rearview mirror. Who made that toy parachutist so central to the film?

Luis Emilio Guzmán deserves the credit for making the parachutist be such a central image in the film. He also came up with the idea of having the cadet, who idolises Silva, be a young soldier from the south who joins the service because he is driven by the same passion as Silva.

The photo of Silva landing with his parachute in the stadium takes a different meaning after the coup, because the stadium became a site of detention and torture during the dictatorship. In an ironic twist of fate, the famous parachuter would end up here as a prisoner. 

Juan Pablo Sallato: Yes, the National Stadium is a beloved stadium that became a notorious centre of detention and torture where thousands were executed. It is also the place where beloved guitarist and songwriter Victor Jara’s hands were chopped off, and where he was shot in front of all the prisoners. This image will never be forgotten. It has now become a site of memory – but you need to know where to look to find the memorial plaque! Jorge Silva and Fernando Villagrán visited the stadium together in 2001, and a photo of them is included in Shoot the Flock.

Red Hangar was filmed in Mendoza, Argentina. Why did you not film it in Chile?

Juan Pablo Sallato: It was complicated to find a location to shoot the film. We needed an Air Force base from the 1970s. La Base Aerea El Bosque in Santiago is the only one from that period. And of course, we knocked on their door. We had to get the government’s permission, but even though Gabriel Boric, a progressive, was still in power then, the Air Force had no interest in the film whatsoever. And even the Minister of Defence, Maya Fernandez, the granddaughter of Allende, was not interested in getting into something that politically charged. It would have been very hard, if not impossible, to make it in Chile. Finally, our colleagues in Argentina were able to help us make this film – at the precise time when the film industry there is crumbling because of the cuts made by President Javier Milei.

How will your film be received in Chile? And do people age 25 or younger even know this history?

Juan Pablo Sallato: They don’t know that history. 

Nicolás Zárate: I feel like in Chile we have no memory. Imagine our dismay at now having a government that admires Pinochet. The premiere of Red Hangar at the Berlinale sadly coincides with the election of José Antonio Kast, an ultraconservative son of a Nazi party member and admirer of Pinochet. 

Juan Pablo Sallato: Kast also voted against the restitution of democracy in the 1988 referendum. We have an incredible capacity to keep on repeating our errors time and again. One does wonder why we do all that work. In fact, today there is pushback against hearing about the Pinochet years again. The younger generation say they are tired of hearing about this story.

How will this new political landscape and pushback against memory affect the reception of the film? 

Juan Pablo Sallato: What we need to do is get beyond any press coverage that frames it as ‘yet another film about the dictatorship.’

Silvia Spitta, Nicolás Zárate, Juan Pablo Sallato, and Gerd Gemünden at the Berlinale Palast, 2026

Endnotes