The Movie Teller

In a mining town in Chile's Atacama Desert, a family's weekly trip to the cinema is the highlight of their lives. When money grows tight, the father, Medardo, proposes a solution: each of his children will see a film and then recount it at home for the others. The youngest, María Margarita, turns out to be extraordinarily gifted at this, and her retellings become so prized that she soon becomes the village's official storyteller, with neighbors who cannot afford tickets gathering to hear her. Her success reshapes her family's circumstances, while the wider historical changes sweeping the country alter the course of her own life.

The Movie Teller (La contadora de películas) is a 2023 drama directed by Lone Scherfig, released in October 2023. It is the seventh feature in her directing filmography, following The Kindness of Strangers (2019) and arriving fourteen years after An Education. Isabel Coixet, Walter Salles and Rafa Russo wrote the screenplay. The cast is led by Bérénice Bejo as María Magnolia, Antonio de la Torre as Medardo and Daniel Brühl as Hauser, with Sara Becker and Alondra Valenzuela playing María Margarita at different ages.

A co-production between Spain, France and Chile, the film runs 116 minutes. Its ratings sit in modest territory, with a 6.6 out of 10 on IMDb from around 1,200 votes and a 6.5 out of 10 on TMDB from a smaller pool of 52 votes, suggesting a limited but fairly consistent audience response.