Chilean filmmaker Thomas Woodroffe’s debut feature, “Erratics”, will have its world premiere in the New Directors competition at the San Sebastián Festival. Combining speculative fiction, ghost cinema and Patagonian history, the film follows the ghost of French filmmaker Lucien Castelnau, who awakens after a century trapped in a glacier and searches for meaning in a changed world. Its central concerns include forgotten films, cultural memory and whether art can exist without an audience.

Denis Lavant plays Castelnau and provides the film’s voiceover, with the story drawing on indigenous memory, displaced communities and the discovery of the 1925 ethnographic documentary “La Terre de Feu”. Woodroffe said the project began after he was mistakenly sent research about the rediscovered film rather than a study of Patagonian photographs. “Erratics” is produced by companies from Chile, France and Argentina, with international sales handled by Paris-based MPM Premium; its wider cast includes Francesca Bozzano, Daniel Muñoz, Dominga Sotomayor and Felipe Gálvez.