Morir de Pie

Cruz (38) is an actress who makes a living playing patients in simulations for medical students—an emotionally draining and precarious job. Her routine seems stable until one night, while jogging at her apartment building’s gym, a woman falls to her death right in front of her. Though Cruz sees it happen, she keeps running, unmoved. Her indifference is captured by the security cameras.

When questioned as a witness, Cruz is unable to explain why she did nothing, which plunges her into an existential crisis. Her relationship with Martín—a doctor revamping the simulated patient program—begins to deteriorate, her ex reappears in her life, and her days descend into chaos. To make matters worse, the arrival of a robotic simulator threatens to replace human actors altogether.

Feeling invisible and trapped in the fiction of her own job, Cruz and her fellow actors decide to fight back: they start causing real accidents to denounce their precarious working conditions. In a drastic move, Cruz injures herself in a shocking way, forcing the university to negotiate. The actors eventually receive compensation and an ironic fate: providing the voices for the digital characters set to replace them.

Though still caught in fiction, Cruz now holds more control over her own script.

Morir de Pie has been supported by the Ibermedia Program, Pfeffer Award, Luxembourg Film Fund, among others.

María Paz González was born in Temuco in 1981. She studied Journalism at the University of Chile and specialized in documentary screenwriting at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and in filmmaking at EICTV (Cuba). Since 2004, she has worked in various areas of audiovisual production.

Her first short documentary, First of All (2005), about children’s orchestras, received the Special Jury Prize at FIDOCS and was broadcast on TVN. Her first feature-length documentary, Daughter, was supported by CORFO and the Audiovisual Development Fund. It premiered at FIDOCS, where it won the award for Best National Documentary.

In 2019, she premiered her first fiction feature, Lina from Lima, at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and the San Sebastián Film Festival. The film received numerous awards, including Best Director at the Valdivia International Film Festival and the FIPRESCI Prize at Cinélatino Toulouse, and was selected for more than 50 festivals worldwide.

Her most recent project, Morir de Pie, has received international recognition, including selection at the San Sebastián Co-Production Forum, the Southern Pfeffer Award at JIFF, and support from the Luxembourg Film Fund.