Her curiosity led her from a local videoclub to international film festival screens. With a career that crosses cinema, literature, and teaching, Malu Furche now joins JUNTOS as a permanent screenwriter.
“Chim chiminee, chim chiminee / chim chim cher-ee…” sang Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, while a young Malu Furche sat watching the screen, unblinking and spellbound. Malu isn’t sure if she truly remembers the scene or if her memory invented it after hearing it so many times within her family. At least according to her mother, that’s the official version.
The desire to study film came later, with Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003). “I was a teenager; there was still a videoclub near my house. We rented DVDs! When I saw it, I thought: ‘How beautiful it is to tell stories,’” she recalls.
With a Bachelor’s Degree in Audiovisual Direction and Aesthetics from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and a Master’s in Creative Writing from NYU, Furche has built a career made of scripts, books, and teaching. She has worked as a screenwriter on Robar a Rodin and Oro Amargo; published the books Islas de calor and Reina del Tamarugal with Editorial La Pollera; and has spent years teaching courses on screenwriting and creative writing.
“Over time I understood that what my thing is to tell stories, but each one demands its own form. Some work as documentaries; others as short films, novels, or plays. I’m drawn to finding the mold that allows each story to unfold,” she says.
On the blank page, everything is possible
Malu is passionate about writing; shooting, not so much. “Filming feels like a great sacrifice. Writing is too, but its intensity is different. On the blank page, everything is possible: later come budgets and reality, but that limitless instant is what thrills me.”
Robar a Rodin (2017) was her first major project. The documentary revisits the sensational 2005 theft of a Rodin sculpture from the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, and its peculiar return as a performance. “We investigated for years. The story was criminal, artistic, comedic, and psychological. That knowledge allowed us to write with authority and arrive at the shooting knowing exactly what we wanted,” she explains about the screenplay she co-wrote with Sebastián Rioseco and Cristóbal Valenzuela, the film’s director.
At the same time, Furche has been pushing fiction projects forward. The most recent is Petra and the Sun, a stop-motion short she co-directed with Stefi Malacchini, which recently received a Special Jury Mention in the Animated Shorts category at the Tribeca Film Festival.
For Malu, filmmaking “is about building worlds, living other lives, and allowing audiences to do the same. Writing lets me be many people at once.”
Writing together (or juntos)
Malu was once a student of Francisco Hervé. “I didn’t do well in his class because I didn’t like directing, but my script was good,” she laughs. Yet her connection with the production company didn’t happen until later, when she became neighbors with Moisés Sepúlveda. After meeting, she joined for one of their project submissions.
Since then, she has worked on Una operación delicada, Que se acabe todo, and Oro Amargo, the only one released to date. “In Oro Amargo my contribution had to do with genre: how to sustain suspense and emotion to build toward a powerful third act. Each project brings its own challenges; sometimes the problems end up being its greatest strengths,” she says.
Now, as a permanent screenwriter at JUNTOS, she has just begun working on La Velera with Francisco Bermejo, Moisés Sepúlveda, and Francisco Hervé: a feature film that intertwines on documentary and fiction to explore the mysteries of the Chilote forest. “Reality is often more delirious than fiction; the hybrid allows the best of both worlds: the grounding of reality and the tools of fiction to enhance it.”
On every project, Malu faces the blank page with the conviction that there, everything is possible. Today, her voice strengthens the JUNTOS team, writing stories that entertain, move, and make us reflect.