Patricio Guzmán

Protests that exploded onto the streets of Chile’s capital of Santiago in 2019 as the population demanded more democracy and social equality around education, healthcare and job opportunities.Read More »

Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán has lived in Europe in exile for many years
but continues to make features about his native country. His latest, the
documentary ‘Salvador Allende’, is not a classical biography (though it has
elements of that too) but rather a chronicle of a search by the filmmaker himself,
who was greatly inspired in his youth by Allende, to see what was is left in Chile
now of Allende’s legacy, and what was it then, that made Allende an inspirational
figure for so many.Read More »

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Winner of the Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, master filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s The Cordillera of Dreams completes his trilogy (with Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) investigating the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in his native country of Chile. It centers on the imposing landscape of the Andes that run the length of the country’s Eastern border. At once protective and isolating, magisterial and indifferent, the Cordillera serves as an enigmatic focal point around which Guzmán contemplates the enduring legacy of the 1973 military coup d’état.Read More »

True story of the saga that was hoped to be the long-awaited justice brought to bear upon Augosto Pinochet, Chilean dictator from 1973 to 1990. In September 1998, Pinochet flew to London on a pleasure trip but experienced back pain and underwent an operation in the London Clinic. Upon waking, he was arrested by Scotland Yard. Could it be that this was to become the first Latin American dictator to answer for crimes while serving as Head of State? After 500 days of house arrest, he nevertheless eventually returned unscathed to Chile, despite the compelling case built against him before & during this period by a young Spanish prosecutor, Carlos Castresana.Read More »

Quote:Winner of the Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, master filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s The Cordillera of Dreams completes his trilogy (with Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) investigating the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in his native country of Chile. It centers on the imposing landscape of the Andes that run the length of the country’s Eastern border. At once protective and isolating, magisterial and indifferent, the Cordillera serves as an enigmatic focal point around which Guzmán contemplates the enduring legacy of the 1973 military coup d’état.Read More »

Documentary that explores the rol of the Chilean Catholic Church in the fight against Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, giving great emphasis to the creation of the Vicaría of the Solidarity and the protests against the violations to the human rights. The film won festival prizes and was shown on European television.Read More »

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This overview of popular religiosity in Latin America journeys from pre-Colombian myths to liberation theology. “A sure synthesis of fiction and documentary. It’s a voice of voices: a space for an encounter of American diversity, which helps us to recognize ourselves as fingers on the same hand.”Read More »

Synopsis
The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds all the voices of the earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of two mysterious buttons which were found on its ocean floor. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are the voices of the Patagonian Indigenous people, the first English sailors and also those of its political prisoners. Some say that water has memory. This film shows that it also has a voice.Read More »

(Chicago reader capsule ) :
“Released in three parts, Patricio Guzman’s epic documentary The Battle of Chile (1975-’79) captured such critical events as the bombing of the presidential palace during the 1973 military coup, but it wasn’t screened in Chile until the 1990s. That belated premiere inspired Guzman to make this 1997 documentary, in which clips from the earlier film are threaded among interviews and powerful sequences showing the reactions of Chilean viewers. Whereas The Battle of Chile uses voice-over narration to summarize its on-the-spot footage, manipulated only minimally by editing, Chile, Obstinate Memory is more expansive. Without ignoring or hyperbolizing the way politics affects our sense of the past, it presents many galvanizing moments; at one point a viewer who was a child during the coup shamefacedly recalls his pleasure at being allowed to stay home from school”Read More »