Critical Moviegoers

By Claudia Paz Niño de Zepeda Alvear

It was a long time ago, on a rather cold April afternoon, when I first met the Harry Potter books. I was only eleven, just like the protagonist, I had only read few pages and I was already unleashing my imagination, lost in the magic that was being described, fantasizing about becoming a witch and studying at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I found the plot of the first book so amazing and entertaining that I couldn’t wait to read the second one. I also loved the way in which J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter saga, described things like friendship, sacrifice and bravery. This book was opening a brand new world, right in front of me. All I had to do to get fully lost into that world was cross the barrier. And so I did.

But reality was quite different from the books and soon I realised that I couldn’t live inside my imagination forever. Real life was beginning to strike me with the fiercest ferocity that I’ve ever faced; my so called school friends didn’t understand the power this saga was having over me… Slowly, my teenager years were forcing me to abandon all I believed in so I could fit in the group of friends I had. I sadly gave up on talking to my friends about this magical world I was discovering book by book, but I never stopped reading, I only needed to keep it as the secret they didn’t need to know. My best kept secret, if you want to put it that way. Those were long years living a secret life, daydreaming of the day when I would finally be able to show my real feelings about the saga without being mercilessly bullied. I was getting weaker by this double life I was leading, but, at the same time, the adventures that Harry Potter lived and survived throughout the books were giving me the strength I needed to overcome these kinds of situations; he was a bullied boy too. Of course I was not fighting against the evilest wizard in history, but those were pretty bad times I was living.

The year I left school, I decided to give myself a gap year to figure out some things inside my head and some other things concerning my future. After a couple of rather awful situations and complicated endings with the people I met in school, I decided to be completely free from every chain that was keeping my secret hidden. After some time on my own, I joined a Harry Potter fan community here in Santiago. I must confess that the first few Saturdays were kind of awkward, it was hard for me to just let go all of the bad moments I had lived, but it was really relieved because here I found some truly good friends, who are just as Potter nerds as I am. These friends have been with me since the day we met and have never had prejudices about what I like or what makes me who I am, because we are very similar in the essentials – even if we’ve had our differences, just like any other group of people. Besides having met this great bunch of people, one of my deepest dreams has finally come true: I had the chance to meet one of the actors of the movies. What’s next? I don’t know, but I’m sure it will be something excellent.