It’s an arresting opening image – a traffic light crackles and burns, suspended above an empty Valparaíso street. There’s faint skylight and we hear a ship’s horn. An edgy, elegiac music track picks up as the camera pulls back to a woman, in a visor and maybe breathing apparatus – a firefighter? She turns, and outlined against the port and cranes, we see she’s carrying a flame thrower.
It’s Ema. She has punkish, slicked-back peroxide hair, a fixed but uncertain, sometimes hurt, look, and she’s a dancer in her partner Gaston’s troupe. She also teaches movement and dance in the primary school her adopted son had attended, until they’d given him up and another couple had taken on fostering him. A difficult boy, he’d started a fire that had burnt Ema’s sister’s face and put the pet cat in the kitchen freezer. Gaston blankly blames Ema and she coolly taunts and blames him. She’s younger – has she learnt from him, the master choreographer, to not show emotion?
