Chile,
1994, 90 min
Shown in 1995
CREDITS
- dir
-
Gonzalo Justiniano
- prod
-
Carlo Bettin, Luis Justiniano
- scr
-
Gonzalo Justiniano, Gustavo Frias
- cam
-
Hanss Burmann
- editor
-
Danielle Fillios
- cast
-
Julio Jung, Pedro Vicuna, Nelson Villagra, Jose Secall, Marcela Osorio
- source
-
Films Transit
OTHER
One of the characters in Amnesia brags: “I was introduced to someone who helped me remember only the positive things. A kind of self-inflicted amnesia.” It is this kind of smug manipulation that’s at issue in Chilean director Gonzalo Justiniano’s fourth feature. One evening the despondent middle-aged Ramírez sees, follows and confronts his former sergeant Zúñiga. The film glides back and forth between their meeting and flashbacks of the desert prison camp where Ramírez was a young soldier under Zuñiga’s command. Too thoughtful to blindly follow the most brutal of orders, but too weak to challenge the system of state-ordained violence, Ramírez was complicit. Now, his sense of guilt having left him deadened, his only hope for redemption is to confront Zúñiga and take some sort of revenge. Infused with surreal black humor, Amnesia hauntingly evokes the cruelty and absurdity of the lower echelons of a military regime obsessed with winning because “history is always written by winners.” Ultimately, the film poses a complex moral and political question: What is the appropriate response to decades of brutal military rule in which there were so many levels of complicity—and what are the alternatives to the “amnesia” advocated by Zúñiga?
—Irina Leimbacher
FACTOID #162
The Stand-In (1985), Nina Takes a Lover (1994), Dream for an Insomniac (1996), Dream with the Fishes (1997), Teknolust (2002) and Dopamine(2003) were not only screened at Festival but were also shot in San Francisco.
