Chela's story is an almost typical one of a teenage girl's coming of age, so familiar to us from our own lives and such previous verité portraits of adolescence as Peggy Stern's Stephanie and Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreine's Seventeen. But Chela lives in Pinochet's Chile, in one of the slums of Santiago, and she is passionately involved in efforts to topple the repressive dictatorship. Hers is a world of rock throwing demonstrations and shared teenage confidences, of tumultuous political meetings and of afternoons spent with her boyfriend, dreaming out loud of their future together. This gritty work masterfully tackles the terrain where the personal and political converge; the naturalistic footage is combined with a sound track that mixes such elements as a diary-like first person voice-over by Chela, an original musical score, and fragments of Chilean radio broadcasts. Rarely skipping a beat, the piece is a beautiful example of documentary as narrative, with so many intimate and tightly constructed scenes that it easily approaches the dramatic possibilities of fiction film. Robert Rosenberg, Global Village Documentary Festival '88.