Director of
El deshielo (The Meltdown)
Manuela Martelli was born in 1983 in Santiago de Chile and made her acting debut in MACHUCA (2004), which brought her widespread recognition in Chile. In 2010, she received a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a Master's degree in Film at Temple University. As a director, she first made the short films APNEA (2015) and MAREA DE TIERRA (2016), before her feature debut 1976 premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2022. Her second feature, EL DESHIELO, which she also wrote herself, is set in Chile in 1992, two years after the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, and premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2026 – making Martelli the first Chilean director to compete in that section with a fiction feature.
Films (selection): APNEA (2015), MAREA DE TIERRA (2016), 1976 (2022), EL DESHIELO (2026)