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This week marks half a century since the beginning of  brutal 17-year dictatorship – a dark and devastating period of Chile’s history that continues to leave scars on the South American country.

On September 11 1973, Pinochet led a , ending the democratically-elected socialist Popular Unity coalition of President . 

Anyone wanting to understand Chile’s turbulent political and social recent history should turn to the films of , the country’s most important documentary filmmaker, who has just been honoured with  for his work.

His significance as a filmmaker is being marked with a  in a collaboration with Cinema Tropical and Icarus Films in New York this month. The week-long event, Dreaming of Utopia: 50 Years of Revolutionary Hope and Memory, features cinema screenings of Guzmán’s films including new restorations of the previously unreleased  (1972) and his classic film  (1975).

This is welcome recognition. Despite being an important  with an international reputation, Guzmán’s work deserves to be more widely known. 

In exile under Pinochet

Like so many Chileans under Pinochet’s dictatorship, Guzmán was forced into exile in 1973 following a period in the  (National Stadium), where many thousands of political prisoners were tortured and murdered. After some time in Cuba and Spain, the director made his home in France.

As someone directly affected by the dictatorship, his films combine the personal with the political. A fiercely partisan defender of Salvador Allende, there is no neutral point of view in Guzmán’s films. They celebrate popular protest and struggles for democracy and equality. They reserve their ire for Pinochet and his legacy, including the  committed by the  under his command.

In an interview with Jorge Ruffinelli in his book on the director, Guzmán describes the role of documentary film as:

The critical conscience of a society. It represents the historical, ecological, artistic and political analysis of a society. A country without documentary cinema is like a family without a photograph album.

Battling for Chile

The Battle of Chile regularly features in lists of best political films and documentaries. It is a three-part, four-and-a-half-hour epic that captures Chile’s complex political landscape and the deep divisions that led to Pinochet’s coup in 1973.

The personal cost of the film is apparent in its opening dedication to the memory of Jorge Müller Silva, the film’s cameraman who was  by the military police. 

One of its most famous scenes illustrates a shocking clash between a peaceful camera shot and a violent gun shot through the footage of Argentinean cameraman Leonardo Hendrickson, who , as the camera is left running after he is fired on by a solider. The film was described by Guardian journalist  as “the sacred text of the general’s opponents at home and abroad”.

Its legacy at home is the subject of Guzmán’s  (1998), a film about the screening of The Battle of Chile on his return to the country in 1996. Banned during the dictatorship, the film is shown, to emotional effect, to young people with little knowledge of the nation’s recent history other than that sanctioned by the military regime, as well as to veterans and survivors of the dictatorship. 

The two protagonists of this Chilean history and all that they represent have marked Guzmán’s work. His film  was released in 2004, followed by  in 2006, which is an exploration of the international and national attempts to bring the dictator to trial.

More important films follow in a remarkable career, including his trilogy  (2010),  (2015) and  (2019), all of which, the films’ distributor Icarus Films explains,  “the relationship between historical memory, political trauma and geography in his native country of Chile”.

The feminist revolution

The roots of the  known as the estallido social (social explosion) are explored in Guzmán’s remarkable film,  (2022). As he says in his documentary, the director wanted to discover how “a whole people had woken up 47 years after Pinochet’s coup in a so-called social outburst, a major rebellion or even a revolution”. 

In contrast to The Battle for Chile, a film in which men dominate the public space, the answer lies with the women activists who feature, and who make up all of the interviewees. My Imaginary Country reveals a Chile riven by deep structural inequality and subjugated by a militarised police force (carabineros) .

Yet the film shows Chilean women fighting for a peaceful future. One image shows a protestor’s powerful slogan: La Revolución será feminista o no será – the Revolution will be feminist or it will not happen at all.

This message permeates the film and is encapsulated by the central role of the . As my co-author Deborah Martin and I pointed out in our  on LasTesis, their street performance of the song A Rapist in Your Path, which calls out state-sanctioned rape culture, went viral globally in 2019, the year of the estallido. 

In December 2021 the new president-elect Gabriel Boric  after beating the far-right Catholic candidate José Antonio Kast. Boric promised to defend the rights they had “worked so hard to achieve”.

Memory is central to the films of Patricio Guzmán, but a key point in My Imaginary Country is that if Chile wants to escape from the cycle of violence and repression his films have chronicled, the future has to be led by women’s movements. Ever the documentarian, no doubt he will be watching how his country responds with interest. 

Deborah Shaw is a Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the School of Film Media and Communication in the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries.

This article is republished from  under a Creative Commons Licence. Read the original article.