New film on Chilean Pinochet dictatorship

This video is the trailer of the film Nostalgia for the Light, about the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.

By Jeff Sawtell in Britain:

Nostalgia For The Light (12A)

Directed by Patricio Guzman

Thursday 12 July 2012

Awesome. Nostalgia For the Light should be required viewing for misanthropists everywhere, especially those who supported Pinochet’s regime in Chile.

Opening with the wheels of a telescope being positioned and images of the pockmarked moon, film-maker Patricio Guzman narrates his fascination for studying the stars.

It’s nothing to do with astrology but about looking for the origins of the universal material forces that created our species, since we live by the light of long dead stars.

Then the camera looks back to Earth to see Chile’s Atacama desert, a place without humidity and no natural animal life

Not completely true. See here.

except astronomers and archeologists.

The first study stars and meteorites and the second search for fossils and neolithic art, reminding us that the native Amerindians have become the “unmentionables.”

Many died as slaves building the 19th-century railways, their work huts providing Pinochet in the 1970s with an ideal site for concentration camps that disposed of those called the “disappeared.”

People search for traces of their loved ones so they can rest the ghosts in their mind while reminding the so-called civilised world that they collaborated with massacring millions.

An architect shows how he paced out the measurements of the camps, then drew them on paper which he destroyed and then redrew them again from memory while living in Denmark.

The history is still raw. Every day the survivors walk the same streets as the unpunished perpetrators, providing a testimony of a time that too many would like to keep us in the dark about.

Every scrap of evidence is bagged and tagged, while others recall the tremendous courage and ingenuity employed by the living to become “transmitters of history.”

Guzman stresses the value of memory. “Those who have a memory are able to live in the fragile present moments. Those who have none don’t live anywhere,” he states.

A damning indictment of systematic genocide, the film illustrates that humanity has the resilience and imagination to learn from the past to make a better future.

It’s the common cause.

Related articles

• Chilean singer Jara’s murderers arrested (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Indigenous Chileans Continue To Oppose Pinochet-Era Highway Project (eurasiareview.com)
• Chile makes arrests in Jara case (bbc.co.uk)