The studio
How it began
DIP Studio began as the formalization of something that had already been happening for years. Bruno Torres had spent a long time making films — directing, producing, editing, solving every stage with whatever means were at hand — before giving the thing a name and a tax ID. In 2021 that work stopped being a loose practice and became a production house: Drunk in Public.
The lack of resources was not an excuse but a starting point.
There is something of a statement in the name. Making films in Chile, on a small budget and with plenty of ambition, always carries something of being drunk in a public square: a mix of nerve, vulnerability and the urge to say something even though nobody asked. The company was born from that — from wanting to tell its own stories without waiting for permission, and from believing that the lack of resources was not an excuse but a starting point.
The strength that came from scarcity
For a long time, low funding was the problem. Then it stopped being one. Scarcity forced us to learn everything: directing, cinematography, editing, sound, production, post-production. Instead of depending on a large crew for every task, DIP ended up commanding every area of filmmaking. What looked like a disadvantage became the mark of the house: the ability to lift complex projects with small teams, without sacrificing what matters, controlling every decision from beginning to end.
A small team is not a limitation, it is a way of working.
That is the logic we still work with today. A small team is not a limitation, it is a way of working. It means that everyone who joins a project is there because they need to be, that decisions are made close to the work and not down a chain of command, and that the result resembles the people who made it. Doing a lot with little stopped being a necessity and became a way of understanding the craft.
The stories we look for
We are drawn to stories that are close to home. The ones that happen inside a house, inside a head, inside a relationship. We are not moved by spectacle for its own sake, but by what happens in the intimate: loneliness, mental health, the different ways of inhabiting the world, memory and what we do with it. Subjects that are hard to look at head-on — and that cinema, when it works, lets us look at sideways, with humor and without solemnity.
The more particular a story is, the farther it can travel.
We believe that the more particular a story is, the farther it can travel. The universal is not built from the generic; it is built from the specific: a piano teacher who collects discarded objects, a guilt inherited across generations that crosses an ocean, someone who understands that memory sets you free once you stop trying to fix it. They are Chilean stories, small in scale and large in what they touch, and that combination is what we want to carry beyond Chile.
The bets
A production house is defined by what it dares to do. DIP sustains a catalogue of auteur film projects at different stages, each one a different bet and all held to the same standard: rigor in the narrative, freedom in the form.
Sustaining what matters even if it takes years.
There is a feature film in post-production that marks Bruno’s debut as a director, financed by Chile’s Audiovisual Fund. There is a drama that weaves three timelines together and reaches back to Sicily to understand a family guilt. There is a comedy about a man who mistakes being available for loving. And there is a short film that uses quantum physics as a metaphor to speak about memory and letting go. Each one is a way of testing how far an intimate story can go when it is taken seriously.
To bet is also to take on the risk. Not every project moves at the same pace or with the same certainties, and that is part of the work: raising what can be raised when it can be raised, sustaining what matters even if it takes years, and never abandoning an idea just because it is hard to finance.
The two souls
DIP lives on two things at once, and both are true.
On one side is auteur cinema, the heart of the house: the catalogue, the bets, the search. On the other is a line of audiovisual production for companies and institutions that has been running for five years, with clients who trust us to deliver demanding projects with the same standard and the same team. That line is not a side job we do to survive while the important thing arrives. It is what allows us to make films on long timelines, without urgencies that distort decisions, without depending solely on winning a fund in order to keep existing.
We don’t separate them because they are not separate.
The two souls feed each other. The discipline and technical capacity demanded by commissioned work sharpen the craft that later pours into the films. And the narrative sensibility of cinema is what sets our commercial work apart from just another service. We don’t separate them because they are not separate: they are the same way of doing things, applied to two different terrains.
Where we are headed
DIP’s next step is to take that catalogue out into the world. To bring our stories to the markets and festivals where Latin American cinema meets the world, to build ties that last, and to open the way toward co-productions that let us make more ambitious films without losing what defines us. We want to be a Chilean production house with a stable presence on the international auteur circuit — one that keeps telling stories close to home and keeps betting, with the same freedom it began with.
That is DIP: a small team that learned to do it all, telling the stories it cares about, without asking permission.
Bruno Torres — filmmaker with over twenty years in the audiovisual field, founder and director of DIP Studio. He directs, writes and edits the house catalogue.