Pablo Larraín Matte (lah-rah-EEN; born 19 August 1976 in Santiago, Chile) is a Chilean filmmaker. He has directed four feature films and co-directed one television series.

Biography

Early life
Pablo Larrain Matte was born on August 19, 1976 to Independent Democrat Union senator Hernán Larraín and Sebastián Piñera's former minister of Housing and Urbanism Magdalena Matte. He studied audiovisual communication at the University for the Arts, Sciences, and Communication in Santiago.


Career
He is a co-founder of Fábula, a company in which he develops his cinematic and advertising projects.

He directed his first feature film in 2005; it was officially released in March 2006 and won international acclaim after winning several prizes at international film festivals, especially those of Cartagena and Málaga. His following films consolidated his international success.

In 2011 he began to direct a television series, Profugos.

His fourth feature film is No, in which Gael García Bernal plays the role of the owner of an advertising company who runs a campaign to vote "No" in the 1988 plebiscite that was designed to keep Augusto Pinochet in power. No was screened in the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Art Cinema Award. The film was also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 85th Academy Awards.

In 2011 Larraín co-directed the television series Prófugos, distributed by HBO Latin America.

Despite his family ties to the Chilean right wing, his work as a cinema director has nothing in common with the right, and Larraín himself is very anti-Pinochet. "In Chile, the right, as part of the Pinochet government, is directly responsible for what happened to culture during those years, not only by destroying it or restricting its spread, but also through its persecution of writers and artists", Larraín declared in 2008. He stated that "Chile found itself unable to express itself artistically for nearly twenty years" and also felt that "the right wing throughout the world is not very interested in culture and this reveals the ignorance that is probably theirs, because it is difficult for someone to make the most of something or to enjoy it if you have no knowledge of it".

In 2013 he was named as a member of the jury at the 70th Venice International Film Festival.


Personal life
He is married to the Chilean actress Antonia Zegers, with whom he had two children: Juana (2008) and Pascual (2011).

Best films