From his childhood fascination with the big screen to the complex choreography of the latest JUNTOS shoot, Mauro Veloso is the director of photography for “Que Se Acabe Todo”.
Before operating cinema cameras, Mauro Veloso watched movies on a tiny television in the south of Chile. He was five years old when his father took him to a real theater and the change in scale was not just visual, it was physical. “I remember the emotion I felt… going from a very small TV to a 16-meter screen,” he says. That childhood fascination found its path when he received his first still camera, igniting the curiosity that would eventually transform into a career in the audiovisual industry.
After consolidating his vision in acclaimed projects such as Baby Bandito, Penal Cordillera, and My Brothers Dream Awake, Mauro directed the cinematography team for Que Se Acabe Todo. “It is a great privilege to be able to take a camera, to be the first spectator, to be the first one who sees the image in the viewfinder,” he comments. The role of the Director of Photography may seem technical, but he is the architect of the atmosphere, the one who defines the light, the shadow, and the visual tone of the story.
However, his greatest rule is humility: the image should never be more important than the story being told. Mauro rejects empty beauty and his philosophy is clear: photography should not be selfish, instead “its main function is to provide and give all the tools to the script and the director, to the story, not to be something pretentious that stands above the film.”
Que Se Acabe Todo in a sequence shot: No cuts, no escape
The collaboration with JUNTOS and director Moisés Sepúlveda led Mauro Veloso to a compelling challenge: shooting Que Se Acabe Todo in a sequence shot. It is not an aesthetic whim, but a coherent way to narrate this financial thriller. “The grace of the sequence shot is not losing the tension and the reality,” he explains. By eliminating the cut, the viewer is forced to experience the crisis in real time, almost without blinking.
This technique proves brutally effective for a story inspired by the abuses of the La Polar Case. The visual continuity drags the audience into witnessing the machinery of fraud without interruptions. Mauro describes the film as “a commercial thriller, but almost with hints of a horror movie, because you see many abuses, something that is of a profound evil…”.
“Why is it important to tell this story? So that it never happens again,” Mauro states. Facing a Chile with “very bad memory,” the intention of the film is clear and urgent. Here, the technical feat of the sequence shot forces us to look, without cuts, at the reflection of what we were.