15th THESSALONIKI DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL - Images of the 21st Century
March 15 – 24, 2013
- PATRICIO GUZMAN TRIBUTE -
Patricio Guzman, born in Santiago, Chile in 1941, is an internationally renowned documentary filmmaker and the founder and director of the International Documentary Festival of Santiago. Throughout his career he has been the recipient of numerous prestigious prizes, amongst others the Jury Award at the 1976 Leipzig IFF, the Peace Film Award at the 1998 Berlin IFF, the Best Political Documentary Award at the 1998 Hot Docs Festival and the Grand Prize of the Semaine de la Critique at the 2001 Cannes IFF. The 15th TDF celebrates his career in and imprint on the art of documentary filmmaking, by screening several of his films and publishing a completely new edition on his work. Patricio Guzman will attend the Festival to present and discuss his work with the Thessaloniki audiences and guests.
Guzman studied film in Madrid at the end of the 1960s and returned home at a time when the sociopolitical climate and historical changes in Chile provided ample material for the young documentarian-to-be. During Salvador Allende’ s election campaign, Guzman turned his camera to his country and people for the first time; his earliest documentary, The First Year (1971), covered the first 12 months of Allende' s socialist government and the hopeful atmosphere surrounding its reforms. His next project, The Battle of Chile, which started shooting in 1972 with black-and-white film stock sent to Guzman by French director Chris Marker, is a seminal 4,5-hour-long documentary in three parts, constituting the ultimate political chronicle of an era that scarred Chile’ s modern history. Starting with the exploration of the problems inherent in Allende’s program and the disillusionment of the middle class, Guzman and a group of exceptional cinematographers (such as Argentine cameraman Leonard Hendrickson, who filmed his own murder by an officer), recorded and investigated the Augusto Pinochet coup d’ etat and, subsequently, the crushed hopes of the working class whose socialist dream was destroyed by his regime.
After the coup, Guzman was arrested by the new establishment and managed to escape his country to find refuge in Cuba -where he completed The Battle of Chile- as well as Spain and France, where he still lives today. Guzman was part of an extensive group of filmmakers who left Chile for Europe, such as Samuel Carvajal, Sergio Castilla, Jorge Fajardo and many others.
All of Guzman’s films are inextricably linked to his country’s people, politics, history and collective memory, as well as the conflicts that arise between these forces. He does not simply record, but gives shape and meaning to historical narrative and consciousness, all the while developing over the years, a unique, contemplative and often deeply personal aesthetic and narrative style. In Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997) Guzman chronicles his return to his country, carrying with him a copy of The Battle of Chile and showing it to survivors of the coup, as well as students facing their own devastating history for the first time. The Pinochet Case (2001) investigates the extraordinary legal case that brought the dictator to his arrest by the Scotland Yard and the historical decision that functioned as a precedent for arresting heads of states for crimes against humanity. More importantly, The Pinochet Case features testimonies from victims of the regime, exposing its horrors in all their gruesome reality. Salvador Allende (2004), equally poignant, paints a portrait of Chile’s socialist leader who, stopped before attempting to fulfill his country’s hopes, nevertheless affected it, and Guzman himself, in a profound manner.
Guzman’s most recent documentary, Nostalgia for the Light (2010), can be viewed as the culmination of all his concerns, ideas and aesthetic pursuits over the past decades, distilled in a lyrical and brilliant cinematic discourse. Providing the eloquent narration himself, Guzman films in the Atacama Desert, employing it as a focal point to draw a philosophical connection between astrology, the “archeology of the skies”, and the horrific human history of the location: near the Atacama observatory with its enormous telescopes, lie the Chacabuco ruins, and the site of the largest concentration camp created by Pinochet’s regime.
In a recent interview, Guzman, storyteller of Chile’s political and social turmoil for the past 40 years and keeper of its collective memory, said that “Each of us carries a backpack on our shoulders; this bag cannot be removed. One carries in it one's whole life…That is the true homeland and that accompanies you until death. It is not necessary to be in a particular country to feel Chilean, Peruvian and Argentinian. One's homeland is carried in the depths of one's heart."
THE FILMS:
Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz), Chile/France/Spain/Germany, 2010, 90’
Chile, A Galaxy of Problems (Chile, una galaxia de problemas), Chile, 2010, 32’
Salvador Allende, France/Belgium/Germany/Spain/Mexico/Chile, 2004, 100’
The Pinochet Case (El caso Pinochet), France/Spain/Belgium/Chile, 2001, 110’
Chile, Obstinate Memory (Chile, la memoria obstinada), Chile/France/Canada, 1997, 58’
The Southern Cross (El cruz del sur), Argentina, 1992, 75’
The Battle of Chile Part 3: The Power of the People (La Batalla De Chile Parte 3: El Poder Popular), Chile/Cuba/France, 1978, 78’
The Battle of Chile Part 2: The Coup D' Etat (La batalla De Chile Parte 2: El golpe de estado), Chile/Cuba/France, 1976, 88’
The Battle of Chile Part 1: The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie (La batalla de Chile Parte 1: La insurreccion De La burguesia), Chile/Cuba/France, 1975, 96’
