Machuca is a 2004 internationally co-produced coming-of-age drama film co-written and directed by Andrés Wood. It stars Matías Quer, Ariel Mateluna, Manuela Martelli, and Aline Küppenheim alongside Federico Luppi. Set in Santiago during the months leading up to the 1973 coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet – which overthrew Salvador Allende's socialist government – the film tells the story of two boys who attend an upper-class elementary school: Gonzalo Infante – who belongs to a rich family with a European background – and Pedro Machuca – who is poor and comes from an indigenous background. They are classmates and become friends at this English-language Catholic elite school, which Machuca attends thanks to the social integration project developed by its director, Father McEnroe. The film is inspired by and dedicated to Father Gerardo Whelan, C.S.C. who from 1969 to 1973 was the director of Colegio Saint George (Saint George's College), the private school depicted in the movie, which the director himself attended as a boy. Machuca was filmed in July 2003 and produced on a moderate budget of US$1,700,000. It is a joint Chilean-Spanish-British-French international co-production with support from Ibermedia. Production companies included Andrés Wood Producciones, Tornasol Films, Mamoun Hassan, Paraíso, and Chile Films. The film premiered in the Directors' Fortnight parallel section of the 57th Cannes Film Festival in May 2004. It was well received in theaters in Chile and a few other countries, but did not have notable box office success outside of Latin America. Plot The story is presented from the perspective of Gonzalo Infante – the 11-year upper-class boy – and it takes place in an agitated time in Chile, when the working class was demanding social vindications and profound changes to the national socioeconomic structure, having elected a Socialist president. In that context, the higher classes grew fearful of the socialist movement and some of its most prominent members comploted against the government of Salvador Allende. Gonzalo's father, while sympathetic to the less favored and not part of the right-wing movement, wants to leave the country with his family for Italy, where he frequently travels due to his work at the UN FAO. Gonzalo's mother is rather hopeless with the state of things, and is having an affair with a wealthy and much older Argentinian. Gonzalo attends a private school where the strong-willed school principal, Father McEnroe, has launched a social integration project, which is