The Lesson of "NO"

My friend and VCFA classmate Linda Washington just started her blog with a review of the film The Artist, and it inspired me to write about a film I saw last weekend that also sheds light on the creative process. The Chilean film No, directed by Pablo Larraín, is one of the five finalists for the Academy Award this year in the Best Foreign Film category. 

Even if it weren't one of the best pictures of the year, I would have seen it because it covers the period in which my YA novel Gringolandia takes place. Many of my friends were involved in the 1988 plebiscite that decided whether Chile's dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, would remain in power for another ten years. I remember vividly watching videos of the 15-minute NO advertisements, crowded into our tiny bedroom in Madison, Wisconsin--the only room in our house that had a TV--along with my husband, our then-one-year-old son Derrick, Nelson Schwenke and Marcelo Nilo of the "Canto Nuevo" band Schwenke & Nilo (they had brought the video and composed/performed some of the music on it), their U.S. manager, and several Chilean friends who lived in Madison.