Thursday 25 April 2013
Patricio Guzmán | France/Chile, 2010 | 90 mins | Cert. 12A | Spanish/English
“I wish the telescopes didn’t just look into the sky but could also see through the earth, so that we could find them.”
10,000 feet above sea level in Chile lies the vast Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth. Astronomers from all over the world gather here atop the mountains to observe the stars; the sky is so translucent that it allows them to see right to the boundaries of the universe. But Atacama is also the site of Pinochet’s concentration camps, where the remains of political prisoners ‘disappeared’ by the Chilean army after the military coup of September 1973 are kept intact by the harsh heat of the sun. While astronomers examine the most distant and oldest galaxies, at the foot of the mountains surviving relatives of the disappeared search, decade after decade, for the remains of their loved ones, to reclaim their families’ histories.
Director Patricio Guzmán, famed for his political documentaries, beautifully combines the celestial quest of the astronomers and the earthly one of the relatives, creating a profoundly moving and philosophical film that is at once intensely political and deeply personal.
11’9”01 by Ken Loach (2002). One of a series of short films all 11 minutes, 9 seconds, and one frame long, produced as a response to the New York attacks in September 2001, in this case showing the tragic consequences of Chile’s own 9/11.