The lives of filmmaker Miguel Littín: from clandestine disguised as an electrician to veteran of the Constitutional Council

Constitutional counselor Miguel Littín outside the Congress headquarters in Santiago.Photos: Cristian Soto Quiroz / El PaísSantiago June 07, 2023Cristian Soto Quiroz

Miguel Littín, 80, leaves the Congress headquarters in Santiago on Wednesday at a leisurely pace. He looks excited, almost stunned. The veteran filmmaker, socialist, accepted a moment ago the position of constitutional advisor to draft a new Magna Carta that buries the one inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. As the eldest of the 50 members of the body, he also had the responsibility of delivering the inaugural address as provisional president. His words brought everyone to their feet: from communists to republicans, from the extreme right. But the emotional charge that accompanies it goes beyond the ceremony. It's a long-standing burden. "I remember when I came here as a clandestine and now I am part of the officialdom," he says as he turns his gaze to the historical monument.

The sympathizer of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity had to go into exile after the coup d'état of 1973, with 30 years. After long years he was able to set foot on Chilean soil again: "I, Miguel Littín, son of Hernán and Cristina, film director and one of the five thousand Chileans with absolute prohibition to return, was back in my country after 12 years of exile, although still exiled within myself: I carried a false identity, a false passport, and even a false wife," reads the book The Adventure ofMiguel Littín, clandestine in Chile, by Gabriel García Márquez. The text, based on conversations between the two friends, recounts the adventures of the Chilean on his secret one-month trip in 1985, where he shot a film in different locations, one of them, the headquarters of the Congress in Santiago.

"I've always been concerned with politics and, at the same time, art, doing the two things one. I came as an electrician in hiding. I watched and filmed with an Italian crew. I remember the deep emotion of being a clandestine in my country after 12 years without knowing anything about him and stepping on Chilean soil that is very important to me," he recalls to EL PAÍS in the gardens of the Congress headquarters in Santiago de Chile. From those recordings hidden in the middle of the dictatorship, Littín returned to the government building on a couple of occasions with emblematic communist leaders such as Volodia Teitelboim, Luis Corvalán and Gladys Marín.

The director of the classic Chilean cinema El Chacal de Nahueltoro (1969) and twice nominated for an Oscar for Actas de Marusia (1976) and Alsino y el cóndor (1983), is not the first time he enters the political arena. Littín was mayor of his native Palmilla, 86 kilometers south of Santiago, in two periods (1992-1994 and 1996-2000).

When he climbed into the front on Wednesday to proclaim his speech, he raised his right arm: "I am here greeting you all – as [the American poet Walt] Whitman taught us – with my hand high and perpendicular, as a sign of peace, harmony and friendship." He spoke of love of country and civic courage. "Let us fight for the agreement, for the peace of the nation, let us be worthy of the task. Otherwise, history will not forgive those who are carried away by passions or revenge of the past," he said. The new counselor tells this newspaper that to elaborate his harangue he read the 10 constitutions and "many things of authors and politicians that have not been well appreciated in Chile," such as Santiago Arcos and Francisco Bilbao, founders of the Society of Equality, the first formal organization that brought together liberal intellectuals and artisans in 1850.

Littín is part of a Constitutional Council where the main political force is the far-right Republican Party. On the overwhelming triumph of the faction led by José Antonio Kast, the filmmaker looks to his own political terrain. "In one way or another we are to blame, there are mistakes that have been made and that must be corrected. We cannot deny that the left has been in a long period of crisis and must be overcome, in relation to representativeness (...) We have not overcome a crisis that has to do with the values that we project and that we exhibit in front of a humanity that is very disoriented, "he says. In any case, it removes iron from the imbalance of the political forces in the body. "We have always been a minority, with that there is no problem. Our thinking is going to be there because it's strong, robust and experienced thinking," he adds. The new Magna Carta, the socialist argues, must be founded on a great agreement that interprets Chileans in every way.

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