Chile, la memoria obstinada
Canada / France,
1997, 58 min
Shown in 1998
CREDITS
- dir
-
Patricio Guzmán
- cam
-
Eric Pittard
- editor
-
Helene Girard
- source
-
First Run/Icarus Films, 153 Waverly Place, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014. FAX: 212- 989-7649
- gga award
-
Golden Spire, Film & Video: History
-
COMMENTS
Screened with From the Inside.
OTHER
In Chile, Obstinate Memory, expatriate filmmaker Patricio Guzmán returns to his homeland to show his landmark film The Battle of Chile (1973-79) for the first time and to explore the political dynamics of contemporary Chile. Made more than two decades after General Pinochet’s army toppled Salvador Allende’s government in a bloody coup, Guzmán’s latest film follows a handful of survivors and Popular Unity movement supporters as they recall events surrounding the coup and Allende’s death. In a series of emotional interviews, several middle-aged Chileans talk about the struggle to come to terms with their country’s past and with their grief for colleagues who were rounded up, tortured or “disappeared” during the wave of terror that washed over Chile in 1973. Guzmán also shows The Battle of Chile to university students who grew up hearing an official, homogenized version of the events. After watching it, the young Chileans express shock, sadness and an unquenchable thirst for the truth. By using footage from his earlier documentary and juxtaposing an older generation’s anguish with a younger generation’s vigorous demands for political disclosure, Guzmán has created a haunting, transformational documentary that captures the resilience of the human spirit and speaks to the enduring power of cinema.
—Julia Segrove-Jaurigi
FACTOID #27
A surrealist stop-motion animator, the Czech Jan Svankmajer, was the first recipient of the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award in 1997. The POV Award honors the lifetime achievement of a filmmaker who works outside of feature-length narrative filmmaking.
