'My imaginary country': Patricio Guzmán, from the battle of Chile to hope in a new nation

2022-09-23T10:41:50.278Z

With style and calm rhythm, always solid, sometimes even poetic, the filmmaker interviews some of the street characters who were key in the social uprisings of 2019

It's funny how sometimes films, initially having nothing to do with origins and styles, end up talking to each other in a week of movie premieres.

Patricio Guzmán, chronicler of his country since the mythical

The Battle of Chile

(1975), recounts that in a talk with the prestigious French documentary filmmaker Chris Marker, he told him: “When you want to film a fire, you have to be in the place where it happens. will produce the first flame.

Marker's advice to Guzmán opens his new documentary,

My Imaginary Country,

Theoretical and practical tour of what happened in Chile from the riots and the social outbreak of October 2019, until the triumph of Gabriel Boric in the second round of the country's presidential elections, in December 2021, against José Antonio Kast candidate of the extreme right.

More information

Patricio Guzmán: "Chile, like almost all of Latin America, is a forgetful country"

That this critic has had the opportunity to see the films by Guzmán and Romain Gavras (who films that first spark of a revolution in

Atenea,

which also premieres today) on the same day, making up an unusual and unexpected double feature on the flame of revolution in a world with a rotten smell, is the least of it.

What is relevant is how two filmmakers as diverse as they are are capable of knowing what ends up moving the town;

which takes him out of his apathy and grief to try to turn the tables.

In the case of

Athena,

the death of a child at the hands of far-right groups.

In the case of

My imaginary country,

something as seemingly insubstantial as the 30% rise in bus and metro fares.

From there, to a new country and a possible new constitution.

History, so often inscrutable and unexpected.

With style and calm rhythm, always solid, sometimes even poetic, Guzmán interviews some of the street characters who were key in the social uprisings of 2019, not for commanding the demonstrations in a "leaderless" struggle, but for being injured by the police response.

People who lost an eye and sight, but not their vision of injustice or the desire to transform things.

Also to relevant personalities, case of the writer Nona Fernández and the journalist Mónica González.

Not by chance, all women, "against the neoliberal system and patriarchy", and in search of a new society protected by a new Magna Carta.

Along with his reflections, those of Guzmán himself, as a narrator with evident warmth and favor on the side of the revolutionaries,

Criticism of former President Sebastián Piñera for using the Army against his people, which took Chileans back to the darkest times of Pinochet's bloody dictatorship, and the error of describing the riots as "a war" also dominate a part relevant to the documentary.

What is it that survives in Chilean society and, above all, in institutions, from those days of repression, persecution and death? asks the director.

Memory, always memory.

At 81 years old, Guzmán, director not only of the trilogy

The Battle of Chile,

but also of the documentaries

Chile, the obstinate memory

(1997),

The Pinochet case

(2001)

Salvador Allende

(2004) and a last trilogy formed by

Nostalgia of light, The mother-of-pearl button