: A Director’s Perspective

In Chile, it is of good taste not to say that you are gay, even if everybody knows it. People are usually infuriated by your sexuality if you are open. Nobody wants to know, so nobody wants to tell.

It is in this context that I ran into the blog of Young & Wild: a site filled with either vibrant tales of a young woman’s blunt bisexual encounters or tender and funny stories about her religious family. I fell in love instantly. The blog was written anonymously, so I couldn’t figure out if the tales were true or inventions made up by a very smart woman. She used teenage slang, mashing up words to create new concepts that spread quickly throughout the web. I was fascinated by her, as also were a lot of other followers. Some of them even proclaimed her “The new Bisexual Messiah.” She was brave enough to show the world her inner fracture: a very biting sexual nature that was completely at odds with her religious upbringing. I knew that I had to meet her and work with her (though I didn’t know how or for what), and after a few emails, she agreed.

She was a young girl, a literature student, very shy but smart and darkly funny. There was a mystery about her that I couldn’t unlock right away. I told her that I wanted to make a movie; she just nodded in consent. Her very orthodox and repressive parents have no idea that this film has even been made.

We had weeks of interviews, in which I tried to approach her life from as many points of view as possible. She showed me pictures of her youth; I visited her parents’ house when they weren’t there; I went to her church. Finally, I was ready to start writing.

I met with Pedro Peirano (screenwriter for The Maid) and we structured the movie based upon the interviews and her blog. After that, she and I wrote the dialogues and the final screenplay. It took us months to do so, but it allowed us to get to know each other better. We based the story loosely on her life, deciding that she had to be 17.