Pablo Larraín was a Golden Globe nominee last year for his remarkable El Club, a scathing and exquisitely literary treatment of the sexual abuse scandal plaguing the Catholic Church. This year the young Chilean talent has vaulted to the forefront of new cinematic talent with two new films. Neruda bowed at the 69^th Cannes Film Festival in May and Jackie debuted a few months later at the 74^th Venice Festival. Both the films, about the Chilean noble laureate poet and Jaqueline Kennedy, are anti-biopics of sorts, eschewing conventional biographical structures in favor of subjective and cinematically poetic treatments of their subjects. Neruda recounts the poet’s (and communist politician) (Luis Gnecco) flight to exile even as he evades a pursuing semi-historical police operative (Gael García Bernal). In the process ostensible historical fact turns into a dramatic plot, much as in a hypothetical Neruda novel. Jackie is an extreme close-up of the First Lady (Natalie Portman) in the hours and days between her husband’s assassination in Dallas and his interment at Arlington National Cemetery, as she endeavors to enhance and preserve his legacy even as she deals with indescribable grief. The HFPA’s Ramzi Malouki spoke to the director about immersing himself in such an eminently American drama.