Julián De La Chica Turns Silence Into a Narrative Language of Its Own
Last week, visual artist and composer Julián De La Chica announced his new film, PIRET. It is the third film in his body of work, but the first he has shot entirely on film stock.
The trailer immediately draws you in through its music: organs, repetitions, winds and strange acoustic effects that slowly converge into a kind of existential chaos. From its opening moments, PIRET suggests a world of suspense, emptiness and loss—and something De La Chica returns to repeatedly when speaking about his work: the abyss.
Already making its way through the international festival circuit, the film brings with it another discovery. De La Chica did not simply write and direct PIRET. He also edited the film and composed its music.
Julián De La Chica.
Photo by Anyelo Troya.
Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. Across composition, cinema, literature and visual art, certain concerns recur throughout De La Chica’s work: memory, displacement, solitude, repetition, mortality and the unstable distance between what happened and what remains. They can be traced through works such as Agatha, his award-winning first film, (available on Amazon Prime), and resurface in PIRET in a darker, more elusive form.
The mediums change. The questions do not.
It is tempting to describe De La Chica separately as composer, filmmaker, writer or visual artist. Increasingly, however, those distinctions feel inadequate. His films possess a composer’s sensitivity to duration and silence; his music develops through repetition, interruption and accumulated psychological tension; his visual work shares the same attraction to absence and fragmentation.
Across these disciplines, De La Chica is building a body of work whose real subject may be the architecture of memory itself. The distinction between composer and filmmaker becomes increasingly meaningless: he composes images and edits music with essentially the same instinct.
Julián De La Chica, Anni Jürgenson & Anyelo Troya
Photo by Liliet Reyes.
De La Chica belongs to a rare category of contemporary artists for whom moving between disciplines does not dilute the work, but deepens it. His latest film may be the clearest expression of that language yet.
PIRET and the Silent Life of the Immigrant
There are films that depict memory, and there are films that seem to operate according to its rules. PIRET belongs firmly to the latter.
The film continues De La Chica’s fascination with women whose inner lives resist easy interpretation. As in Agatha and Dora, the female protagonist is not presented as a psychological
problem to be decoded, but as a presence whose contradictions, silences and private realities remain partially beyond our reach.
Anni Jürgenson
Photo by Anyelo Troya.
Shot in black and white on Kodak Double-X Super 16mm, PIRET follows a young Estonian immigrant and single mother attempting to rebuild her life in 1970s New York after leaving Soviet Estonia. Her experience of immigration is rendered not through grand declarations of displacement, but through something quieter: solitude, work, fractured encounters and the persistent feeling of living somewhere without ever fully arriving.
What initially resembles an immigrant story gradually dissolves into something more elusive—a meditation on the instability of identity itself.
People appear and disappear. Encounters repeat with subtle variations. Sounds seem detached from their origins. Time bends without announcing that it has done so. The distinction between memory, premonition and reality becomes increasingly uncertain. PIRET is less a film about memory than a film that behaves like memory.
De La Chica does not treat ambiguity as a narrative trick waiting to be solved. There is something quietly radical in his refusal to explain Piret. Immigration, motherhood and psychological isolation are never reduced to convenient dramatic symbols. Considerable parts of her remain inaccessible. Piret belongs to herself before she belongs to the audience.
Julián De La Chica, Anyelo Troya and Liliet Reyes.
Photo courtesy by IGM.
Estonian artist Anni Jürgenson understands this instinctively. Her performance rarely announces what Piret is feeling. Gestures, pauses and silences accumulate around the character until interiority itself becomes a kind of presence.
Jürgenson finds an intriguing counterpart in Colombian singer and activist Chico Raro, who plays Maestra Gertrudis, a pseudo-fortune teller who seems to carry something of the mysticism of the Amazon into Piret’s otherwise austere world. Their encounter shifts the film almost unexpectedly: for a moment, its psychological severity gives way to something eccentric, theatrical and distinctly Almodóvarian. Together, Jürgenson and Chico Raro form an unlikely pair, quietly weaving another thread into Piret’s uncertain fate.
That restraint extends to the film’s visual language. Cuban cinematographer Liliet Reyes gives PIRET an austere yet intimate visual character, while Anyelo Troya’s expertise in analog filmmaking and 16mm camera work brings that vision to celluloid. Together, they embrace the medium’s grain, darkness, imperfect focus and negative space as part of the film’s language. Cuban, Chile-based colorist Ignacio Cabrera, working through Aliwen Color, further shaped its monochromatic palette into something tactile and spectral.
Taiwanese sound designer and re-recording mixer Kevin Yang extends that instability into the acoustic world. Sounds arrive without immediately revealing their source; silence can feel as constructed as dialogue.
In PIRET, silence is not the absence of narrative. It is narrative.
Music, Despair and De La Chica’s Abyss
The film becomes particularly revealing when considered alongside another major De La Chica work arriving this year: After Beauty – The Complete String Quartets, Op. 7, the first complete recording of his quartet cycle, recorded by the Kahlo Quartet.
Kahlo Quartet. Photo by Julián De La Chica.
The music long predates PIRET. The first quartet, Hypnagogia, was premiered at Carnegie Hall in March 2016 by the Grammy Award-winning Scorchio Quartet. A decade later, celebrating its 10th anniversary, the complete Op. 7 cycle has been recorded for the first time and will be released in October 2026. It will be the world-premiere recording of the complete cycle.
The quartets were never intended as a score for PIRET. Yet during post-production, the boundary between the projects unexpectedly began to disappear. A movement from the cycle entered the film and ultimately became part of its emotional architecture.
There is a sense of hopelessness in this music, an abyss that seems to exist beneath both works. Yet the relationship feels less like conventional film scoring than a collision between two works that discovered they shared the same psychological vocabulary.
The music does not explain PIRET. It seems to remember the film.
The Presence of Absence
PIRET has already begun attracting recognition on the international festival circuit, receiving two Awards of Recognition at the 17th IndieFEST Film Awards for Anni Jürgenson’s leading performance and Kevin Yang’s sound work, followed by Best Short Film at the Amsterdam NewCinema Film Festival.
But its most lasting quality may have little to do with awards. It is the strange residue the film leaves behind.
Certain images remain without revealing why. A sound acquires significance several scenes after it first appears. Characters seem capable of existing simultaneously as people, memories and projections. Even after the film ends, its uncertainties continue reorganizing themselves.
Memory, after all, does not operate through clean exposition. It omits, exaggerates, rearranges and occasionally manufactures the continuity upon which identity depends.
PIRET understands this intuitively.
Some memories never leave.
Some never arrive.
And somewhere between the two, De La Chica has made a film.
Watch the official trailer: HERE
